The Republic by Plato | Notes & Summary

A Critique of Democracy

To understand why the question of justice is so central to The Republic, we must first understand Plato's critique of democracy: the mode of government in Plato's Athens and the problem for which justice is the solution.

Plato believed that there were five political regimes which followed after one another in decline. Aristocracies are ruled by an elite that prized virtue; timocracies are ruled by an elite that prized honor; oligopolies are ruled by an elite that prized money (we see in these first three regimes different parts of the tripartite soul being prioritized); democracies are ruled by everyone; lastly, tyrannies are ruled by a single person.

Plato's critique of democracy can be summarized as prioritizing freedom over virtue. The freedom that democracies provide isn't a valuable freedom to do what is virtuous, but rather a superficial freedom to do what one wants. The problem, Plato argues, is that we rarely want the Good and virtuous and we don't really know what will grant us happiness.

Because of the priority of freedom, virtue disappears. Plato distinguishes between necessary desires (shelter, food, comfort…) that we truly need with unnecessary desires that can be unlearnt (luxuries, immense pleasure, …). In Democracies, the latter proliferates because there is no elite class to guide the society. Instead people just imitate each other and culture descends to the lowest common denominator. "Insolence they term breeding, and anarchy liberty, and waste magnificence, and impudence courage. And so the young man passes out of his original nature, which was trained in the school of necessity, into the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary pleasures".

As a result of this lack of virtue, society is no longer grounded and becomes chaotic. People also will not be able to discern virtuous characters. Only demagogues will be elected that further grant the people what they want instead of choosing what is good for them. We are already seeing here a tension between perfectionism and liberalism on the matters of freedom. E.g. Is it more free to be able to watch porn or to be free from the unnecessary desires that watching porn creates? Is the freedom to do drugs more valuable than the freedom to be free from the cravings of drugs?

As a result, democracies, or so Plato argues, must descend into tyranny. At a certain point the society would be so chaotic and the people would be so blind to what true virtue is that they will elect a tyrant to bring order.

Justice

We then move on to the cure of the chaos and virtuelessness that, according to Plato, democracy has wrought: justice.

He asks four interlocutors what justice is but shows the lack of consistency in all of their definitions. All of the provided answers are all in some way external: a law, an appearance… but Plato believes that justice is internal, it is a mode of being. It is interesting that Plato thinks that justice is a mode of being while Aristotle thinks happiness is a set of actions.

Specifically, justice is harmony -- the harmony of a well-ordered whole where each differentiated part performs the tasks it is best suited for. Plato thinks that it is easier to see this concept in a state than in a person so he discusses societal justice first before talking about the just person. But there is a very interesting isomorphism as the balance between the tripartite soul on the personal level is similar to the balance a just society ought to seek between the guardians, producers, and auxillary.

Societal Justice and the Kallipolis

Kallipolis is the name of Plato's fictional utopia. It is the best of the five regimes: an aristocracy.

Its members are separated into three classes. The ruling class of the guardians, the merchant and productive class of the producers, and the military class of auxiliaries. Justice is therefore a form of specialization and non-interference with others' matters.

The guardians are philosophers "Those, I said, who are lovers of the vision of truth." They live quite rigid lifestyles that are not designed to make them happy but to benefit the whole city. They have no spouses or identifiable children but instead only have sex on designated festivals, bringing up the birthed children together. This is to help foster unity and patriotism.

The proposal for philosophers to rule was quite an outrageous one concerning most people considered them either useless or vicious. But Plato insisted on the primacy of reason in ruling: "Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils --nor the human race, as I believe -- and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day."

But perhaps the most interesting aspect of these philosopher-kings is that they need to, much like the ideal Theilian founder, embody polar-opposite traits within themselves. They need to not desire to rule but be masterful at it. They need to be naturally charismatic yet extremely thoughtful. They need to be tempered yet courageous.

You are aware, I replied, that quick intelligence, memory, sagacity, cleverness, and similar qualities, do not often grow together, and that persons who possess them and are at the same time high-spirited and magnanimous are not so constituted by nature as to live orderly and in a peaceful and settled manner; they are driven any way by their impulses, and all solid principle goes out of them.

…

And both should be in harmony? … Beyond question … And the harmonious soul is both temperate and courageous? Yes.

Personal Justice

Plato now talks about justice on the personal level. He elucidates the tripartite soul of reason, spirit (honor-seeking), and appetite (pleasure-seeking). Much like how the guardian directs the two other classes, so should reason direct the two other drives. It is not that we should stop seeking honor or pleasure all together but rather that they should be tamed and bounded by reason.

Just as how the philosopher-king embodies traits that rarely can be contained together, the just person harmonizes all the elements within his psyche and utilizes them appropriately under the overall guidance of reason.

The just person is also the happiest person Plato argues because they are the ones wise enough to truly see what is Good. They are the only ones who are not enslaved by their other two drives.

The Theory of Forms

Justice is a disposition to best pursue the Good through the reasoning part of the soul. But what is the nature of this Good?

Plato posited his theory of forms: the phenomenal realm we experience everyday are but imperfect projections of perfect, eternal forms. Behind something beautiful there is the perfect form of beauty, behind something triangular, there is a perfect form of a triangle.

The forms themselves are also arranged in a certain hierarchy and the form of the Good was the root of all other forms. The good (ethics), the real (metaphysics), the true (epistemology), and the beautiful (aesthetics) are all encapsulated in this greatest form. This metaphysical correspondence between ethics and aesthetics will be quite important in the discussion on media and why Plato viewed aesthetic choices to have ethical consequences.

Platonic forms, unlike Aristotelian forms, don't exist just in their substantiations. E.g. The number one (it is easier to see with numbers) is an abstract thing that has an existence outside of all the instances of one. This existence is independent from us: we can gain access to these abstract things yet they are not constituted by us grasping them. The best modern way to understand forms are natural laws or mathematics (Plato was very interested and well-trained in math).

Plato explicitly only outlined normative forms (the Beautiful and the Good in the Republic) and abstract forms (the One, the Many, Motion, and Rest in a later dialogue). He did not himself outline many other forms. In fact, in the later dialogues he becomes more suspicious of forms and highlights the problem of this theory. It is his Christian predecessors who take a more hard-lined stance and insist on this being a theory, Plato himself seemed much more reserved. A big problem with neo-Platonist attempts at fleshing out a theory of forms is to answer the question: what forms are there?

Media and Mimesis

Plato was not only hypersensitive to how mimetic we are, but also to how much we can be affected by the subtlest media elements such as rhythm. In fact mimesis can be attributed as the cause of the degeneration of culture in democracy, further explaining why Plato set up such rigid barriers in his utopia.

Plato wanted to implement a strict censor on all media: ”The first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only.”

He considered bad media to be those that told lies about virtue. Plato disliked most of the media in Athens because 1. people are imitating the particular of the performer rather than the form of virtue and 2. the performer himself, who has an ill grasp on virtue, usually turns himself into the hero which led Plato to fear that people wouldn't even imitate the singularly-removed hero but the doubly-removed, romanticized version of the hero.

While this may seem overly dramatic, it echoes modern concerns about graphic depictions of violence in movies, degradation of women in porn/rap, and so on. Plato highlights an important connection between the aesthetic and the ethical, and the importance of media in shaping behavior. We imitate what we are constantly exposed to, and then we become what we repeatedly do.

Alienation and the Education of Philosophers

Plato announces his most puzzling and perhaps original position on education in the middle of Book IV: what is necessary for the education of philosophers is alienation. Plato cites being “kept down by exile” “living in a small city,” being “held back by the bridle,” “daemonic signs,” and “physical illness” as not only conducive to but, in some sense, constitutive conditions of practicing philosophy.

To make sense of this puzzling insistence, we must reconstruct the argument leading up to this point. Plato defines a philosopher to be someone who not only enjoys all types of learning but is, above all, considered with true knowing – knowledge of the forms. From this single disposition, Plato derives three virtues that naturally follow from the philosophical character. Because the philosopher gains pleasure from the understanding, he will not be so concerned with material pleasures or money and, thus, he is moderate. Because the philosopher is concerned about understanding everything as a whole, his mind will not focus on trivialities and, thus, he will be generous. Lastly, because the philosopher has access to true being, he won’t consider human life to be overly important and, thus, will be courageous.

Plato’s next move is to suggest that it is precisely these good qualities that flow from the philosophical disposition, alongside other good qualities that do not flow from the philosophical disposition but may nevertheless be found in one (tall, good-looking, etc) which corrupt the philosopher to-be. Specifically, he will be so excellent a character that society will always want to make use of him. Even if he realizes this and wishes to leave and lead the quiet, philosophical life, other’s will not let him. The would-be philosopher, sucked into society, is corrupted by receiving an education of the mob – inheriting the standard, deficient values of the masses. Thus, there are commonly two types of people. First, there are people who have the requisite talents of the philosopher but who have been corrupted by worldly influence. Second, the people who end up going into philosophy are talentless. These Plato takes to be the sophists. Both groups give philosophy a bad name.

Under this light, Plato’s original insistence begins to make more sense. A true philosopher must have the talents of the philosophical disposition. Yet, it is precisely these talents that usually lead one to be sucked into the worldly life and become corrupted. The only way the philosophical disposition finds itself in a non-corruptive environment, is if the philosopher, for some reason is alienated and in exile:

Then there remains, Adeimantus, only a very small group who consort with philosophy in a way that’s worthy of her: A noble and well brought-up character, for example, kept down by exile, who remains with philosophy according to his nature because there is no one to corrupt him, or a great soul living in a small city, who disdains the city’s affairs and looks beyond them. A very few might be drawn to philosophy from other crafts that they rightly despise because they have good natures. And some might be held back by the bridle that restrains our friend Theages—for he’s in every way qualified to be tempted away from philosophy, but his physical illness restrains him by keeping him out of politics. Finally, my own case is hardly worth mentioning—my daemonic sign—because it has happened to no one before me, or to only a very few. Now, the members of this small group have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is, and at the same time they’ve also seen the madness of the majority and realized, in a word, that hardly anyone acts sanely in public affairs and that there is no ally with whom they might go to the aid of justice and survive, that instead they’d perish before they could profit either their city or their friends and be useless both to themselves and to others, just like a man who has fallen among wild animals and is neither willing to join them in doing injustice nor sufficiently strong to oppose the general savagery alone. Taking all this into account, they lead a quiet life and do their own work. Thus, like someone who takes refuge under a little wall from a storm of dust or hail driven by the wind, the philosopher—seeing others filled with lawlessness—is satisfied if he can somehow lead his present life free from injustice and impious acts and depart from it with good hope, blameless and content.

Myths

Here are some of the most important myths and metaphors in The Republic.

The Ship of State

Plato compares running a state to captaining a ship. The navigator, a metaphor for the philosopher-king, is the only one educated in the mechanisms of sea-faring, star-gazing, etc. The crew, a metaphor for the mob, cannot understand his talents. They ignorantly assume themselves more competent than the navigator, and strip him of his position. Yet the crew soon find that they do not understand the nuances of navigation and bring disaster.

The Myth of Metals

Plato advises his hypothetical Guardians to spin falsehoods that are ultimately beneficial for the state. "Noble lies" he terms them.

Then if any one at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good. But nobody else should meddle with anything of the kind; and although the rulers have this privilege.

One such noble lie is the Myth of Metals. It explains that people are all born from the earth and God has molded them from a specific metal that corresponds to one of the three classes. It is meant to foster a sense of unity as well as to justify the tripartite division.

The Ring of Gyges

In the discussion of justice, a thought experiment was proposed. To prove that justice is only useful when it is observed by others, one of the interlocutors hypothesized a ring that would grant the user invisibility. This user, he argued, would be better off to rape, steal, and plunder than to be just.

Allegory of the Cave

In an attempt to explain his Theory of Forms and the lonely but rewarding journey to gain access to them, Plato posited the Allegory of the Cave.

Plato describes a cave in which prisoners only interact with the real world by seeing the shadows cast by real objects passing through an opening. A prisoner escapes and sees the real world. He descends back into the cave and sees how empty and vane the pursuits of the prisoners are: they only talk about the shadows of these objects with no idea of what they truly are.

There is significant correspondence with the Buddhist path of liberation: not only the themes of light, freedom, and truth, but also the dualistic split of reality.

The Myth of Er

The Myth of Er, told at the very end of the Republic, is the story of a man who travelled to the underworld and saw how different people chose different lives to reincarnate into. 

This was a myth similar to the Myth of Metals to create a "noble lie" for people who couldn't understand why it's important to be just.

There are three things about the reincarnation process I found particularly interesting:

What Er observed was that it wasn't the ones who came from the heavens who picked the best lives. They often picked terrible lives as tyrants who end up eating their own children. Rather, it was the ones who suffered in the human life who made the wisest decision. Reminds me of how they say the human form is the best to obtain Buddhahood because of the mix of suffering and joy we have as a human, a lower form would suffer too much and a god would only know pleasure. "And it was true of others who were similarly overtaken, that the greater number of them came from heaven and therefore they had never been schooled by trial, whereas the pilgrims who came from earth, having themselves suffered and seen others suffer, were not in a hurry to choose."

More commonly than not, animal picked human lives and humans animal lives. It is the classic grass is greener syndrome.

Odysseus, who had one of the most spectacular and rich lives in terms of experience and wisdom chose to live a life of a simple, undisturbed farmer.