In this course we study the ancient, Socratic art of blowing up your beliefs as you go, to make sure they're built to last. We spend six weeks studying three Platonic dialogues - "Euthyphro", "Meno", "Republic" Book I - then two weeks pondering a pair of footnotes to Plato: contemporary moral theory and moral psychology. Platonic? Socratic? Socrates was the teacher, but he said he never did. Plato was the student who put words in his teacher's mouth. You'll get a feel for it. We have a book: the new 4th edition of "Reason and Persuasion", by the instructor (and his wife, Belle Waring, the translator.) It contains the Plato you need, plus introductory material and in-depth, chapter-length commentaries. (Don't worry! John Holbo knows better than to read his book to the camera. The videos cover the same material, but the presentation is different.) The book is offered free in PDF form - the whole thing, and individual chapter slices. It is also available in print and other e-editions. See the course content for links and information. The course is suitable for beginning students of Plato and philosophy, but is intended to offer something to more advanced students as well. We seek new, odd angles on old, basic angles. Tricky! The strategy is to make a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach. Lots of contemporary connections, to make the weird bits intuitive; plus plenty of ancient color, still bright after all these years. So: arguments and ideas, new possibilities, old stories, fun facts. Plus cartoons. The results can get elaborate (some book chapters and some lesson videos run long.) But each video comes with a brief summary of its contents. The lessons progress. I put them in this order for reasons. But there's no reason you can't skip over and around to find whatever seems most interesting. There are any number of self-contained mini-courses contained in this 8-week course. You are welcome to them. Plato has meant different things to different people. He's got his own ideas, no doubt. (Also, his own Ideas.) But these have, over the centuries, been worn into crossing paths for other feet; been built up into new platforms for projecting other voices. (Plato did it to Socrates, so fair is fair.) So your learning outcome should be: arrival somewhere interesting, in your head, where you haven't been before. I wouldn't presume to dictate more exactly.
Lesson 6 Part 8: Justice, Inside & Out
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Reason and Persuasion: Thinking Through Three Dialogues By Plato
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National University of Singapore
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From the lesson
Plato's Republic, Book I: Thrasymachus.
We finish up “Republic”, Book I. We have gotten to Thrasymachus, the main attraction. He’s attractive-repulsive, as a person. ‘Justice is the advantage of the stronger!’ In this Lesson I lay out his views. I think it’s best to see him as suspended between a few theoretical possibilities, not really settled on one. But he’s definitely an egoist. But egoism and justice aren’t the same thing, are they? I relate the Thrasymachus material to the rest of “Republic”, in which a refined version of Thrasymachus’ view eventually receives a long, considerate response from Socrates. He builds Utopia to refute Thrasymachus. So the guy must be important.
Meet the Instructors
John Holbo, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT of PHILOSOPHY
In this video, I'm going to outline how Plato plans to dig his way out
of this hole he dug himself into, in book two of Republic, Glaucon's challenge.
You understand that in trying to sum of all of
books two through 10, that's going to meaning leaving stuff out.
But you gotta know how it comes out.
So here are some possibilities.
One maybe Plato thinks that Thrasymachus is right, that is, Glaucon is right, and
that means there's a lot of truth to what Thrasymachus says.
But you can't tell people that, it'll destroy society.
You have to force people to wear those visibility
rings I talked about, to get the power of justice.
How do you do this?
Well, brutally short and unvarnished version, you lie
to them, about the how the gods are watching.
Tell them they will be punished ten fold for their wrongs in the afterlife.
It isn't true. Well, at least,
we don't know if it's true but we are all better off if everyone believes it.
Two, slightly milder form of the medicine.
Teach everyone in the city that they are
all brothers who sprang out of the ground together.
Obviously people care about family, so if everyone
thinks everyone is family, they'll care about everybody.
It's not exactly true, but it's the closest we can get to the kind of harmony
those naked mole rats enjoy.
There's only one queen in the naked mole rate colony.
They really all are brothers, that's why they get along.
We humans, by contrast, have to lie ourselves into any such new social state.
Three, non-lying version.
Maybe Plato thinks Thrasymachus is wrong but he thinks the rational
proof that Thrasymachus is wrong is not the sort of thing you
can sell to the general public.
So Plato's kind of the anti-Machiavelli on this reading.
Machiavelli talks as though it's easy to believe in the nobility of good faith and
honesty and all that, hard to appreciate the subtle wisdom of egoism and cynicism.
Plato thinks the opposite. Cynicism seems to make total sense.
It's the logic of the inherent desirability of justice that is obscure.
Maybe Socrates's conclusion is a valid one, but only according to some higher
math than most people can rationally grasp, justice is always in my advantage.
This makes the lying less bad, maybe.
Normally we think the effect of lying is to give people false beliefs.
This could be a case of giving them a true belief
that isn't knowledge, shades of that final section of the meano, remember?
Maybe no one knows what virtue
is, but people may happen to have true belief.
Virtue ought to be rational mindfulness but in practice
it's kind of a hit and miss irrational inspiration.
We read the end of the meano if you've forgotten but
let's move on what could this higher mathematics of justice be?
At the end of book two Socrates outlines a plan for investigating justice, so as to
beat back Glaucon's challenge.
He is going to look first at justice writ large, justice in the whole city.
Justice writ small in the individual soul must be the same kind of thing.
So when we finally turn to the individual person, we'll know what we're looking for.
As many commentators have noticed, this argument
by homology, the macrocosm of the city
must mirror the microcosm of the soul, it's very poetic, but doubtful.
They're right.
But let me offer you a quick reason to accept the approach.
Remember what I said about bees?
If you want to know what a healthy bee is
like, a functional bee, a virtuous bee, if it
didn't sound funny to call it that, you would
first want to understand how a healthy hive functions.
For a social animal, the society is the basic unit as it were.
We humans are social animals, despite our tendency to think we see virtue,
excellence, right up there on a pedestal, the truth his we need to pan back.
Maybe women love a man in uniform, maybe men admire him, but we don't know
how just and virtuous that guy is until we figured out what the good society
looks like. How many men in uniform do we need?
What do we really need them for?
This still leaves room for a fallacy, just because a healthy hive works
like so, it doesn't mean that a healthy bee works like so, that is like a hive.
There is no reason why each bee needs to be, or
contain, a little mini hive in itself just because bees need hives.
You sort of see the slip? Let's push on.
Very briefly, Plato argues for a three tier social structure in the city.
Philosopher Kings at the top, they're the wise technocrats, you might call them.
Under them, the guardian class or
auxiliaries, from whose ranks philosopher-kings are drawn.
Who are we imagining here?
Plato is obviously casting himself as philosopher-king, no surprise there.
Think about
Polimacus, he wants honor, but he also wants to do the right thing.
He's got an us and them ometer, remember about that?
But how can he be sure that us and them lines up with right and wrong?
Well, there's no reason why they should always line up.
But, if he happens to be working for a guy who knows right from wrong,
rationally, and that guy makes sure Polimicus's
us and them ometer in fact always tracks
right and wrong, maybe that's how it works.
Under the guardians, the axillaries, we see
the producers, the demoss, the common people.
I could also call them the consumers. They want stuff.
That's their defining characteristic. Plato is rather contemptuous of that.
So he probably thinks the best of this type is like Kaffalas;
someone who thinks in consumer terms, buying and selling, but it was killed,
his personal desires in his old age.
There's a myth of metals that goes with all this.
Everyone thinks they come from the same earth.
Remember that? We're all brothers here.
But those at the top are more gold, under
them the silvers and the rest, mere bronze, and iron.
Where is virtue?
Where's justice?
Well, the philosophers have wisdom.
The guardians or auxiliaries generally have courage,
honor lovingness, and what about moderation
and last but not the least, justice.
They're a kind of a relational property.
There is justice and moderation in the city when the
three natural classes know their place and are in their place.
That is no one exactly practices justice.
It isn't an action, any particular type of person characteristically takes.
You can't really put it
upon a pedal stool in the form of a single person.
It's a harmony between people.
I am not going to say much about this allegedly ideal
platonic social structure.except the note that it mostly horrifies modern readers.
I think, more or less, rightly so.
It is rigid, authoritarian, severely socially stratified
and maintained by a sustained propaganda campaign.
Looking back to the history
of oh, say the 20th century, it's not hard
to see how this kind of thing could go wrong.
Okay.
I'll say a bit more about it in the
next video to close out our whole Plato lesson set.
Plato had his reasons, even if you think we are right to reject them, as I do.
But first, let's shrink ourselves down to the size of
a soul, smaller even, and see what we can see.
Justice in the soul
is going to be a proper relation between parts, three parts to be
exact, our reasoning part, our honor-loving
part, and our appetitive or desiring part.
That's gold, silver, and bronze, just like in the city.
In book nine, we get a vivid metaphor
for this, although the division is introduced earlier.
By the way, in my book, page 288, I managed
to be misleading about this, I skipped suddenly from book
three to nine, summarizing Plato's overall idea.
I should have more clearly indicated on the page, that
in pulling things together I was skipping around on the page.
Sorry about that.
At any rate, setting, set the following metaphor alongside Machiavelli's metaphor
of the ideal ruler who was part fox, part lion, part man.
Imagine the figure of a man and
within him, a smaller figure of a man. Also, inside that big man, the figure of a
lion and also a kind of monster with many heads, animal heads growing out in a ring.
The figure of the man is reason, the lion is honor lovingness, and the monster
is desire, appetite, all those heads. You get the metaphor, right?
Socrates specifically asks us to imagine that the monster is the biggest,
the lion is second biggest and the man is this poor little shrimp.
What is this?
This is the soul of the tyrant, of the unjust man.
This is who Thrasymachus wants to be when he grows up.
A city built along these lines is very unhappy.
You get no argument from me.
Not even from Thrasymachus. But is the man
at the top happy? Yes, says Thrasymachus.
And so long as that's you, who cares about the rest?
No, says Socrates. Why not?
That guy's the ultimate wolf in sheep's clothing.
Forget that.
He's the wolf in shepherd's clothing.
Whoever coined that phrase, wolf in
sheep's clothing, wasn't dreaming big enough.
I know, says Thrasymachus, that's what I love about this guy.
But the joke is on Thrasymachus, says Socrates.
Why?
Because inside this Trojan horse, to put it
that way, is another Trojan horse, the wolf
of his desires has snuck into the fold
of his human nature and inevitably it will eat
him up, the man in him is a slave to the beast all those desires he will
never be able to satisfy them; They will grow and grow, he will be miserable and
come to a bad end within and in all likelihood, without.
We see it happening already.
Remember what I said at the start?
Glaucon builds a way better Thrasymachus than
Thrasymachus can build, but Glaucon doesn't like Thrasymachus.
Isn't that ironic? Well, maybe yes, but it's predictable.
It makes psychological senes.
The sorts of conceptual errors Thrasymachus makes
are the sorts of slips you would expect from a boastful egotist.
Here we see a reverse paradox to the one about justice, maybe.
Remember in order to make it work, you need to have a
false believe about what it truly is, what's the parallel problem for egoism?
Egotists are bad at practicing egoism.
But believing in ego doesn't make you an egotist.
It's a philosophy of prudent overreach,
but eventually you overreach the prudent
limits of overreach, because that's so you.
The monster of desire in you drowns out other sources of
input, you get stupid, then you get miserable, then you die.
Okay, I exaggerated in calling all of this
higher math and it may be insufficient comfort
for that hypothetical just man you remember, tortured,
deprived of reputations soon to be executed, but this
image of how Thrasymachus goes down hill is physiologically plausible.
If you want to be happy, you shouldn't set out to be a tyrant.
That's a stupid plan.
That's a stupid hypothesis about the sort
of thing that would probably make you happy.
Plato's right.
More specifically, he's right that you will
be alienated from yourself, you will be
conditioning yourself to be subject to a part of yourself that you will not like.
And then it will be too late,
probably.
Which is not to say that Plato's
authoritarian political paradise sounds great after all.
A few last thoughts about that in the final short video, and we're done.
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