Plato, Republic 340 c2-5

Greek Learning Greek
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I’m continuing this discussion from the thread captioned Plato, R. 339 d1-3. I wanted to start a new thread to perhaps elicit comments from others about Socrates and Thrasymakhos in the first book of Plato’s Republic. In the previous thread, Tugodum and I discussed the syntax of Thrasymakhos’ definition of τὸ δίκαιον as τὸ τοῦ κρείττονος συμφέρον and Socrates’ reformulation of it as τὸ τοῦ κρείττονος συμφέρον δοκοῦν εἶναι τῷ κρείττονι.

I’m not really competent to discuss Plato’s philosophy, but I’ve read the Republic and the discussion of syntax rekindled some thoughts – which are undoubtedly naive from a philosophical point of view – to which I’d like to get reactions. The syntactic discussion brought into focus for me why I ultimately find Book 1 and, indeed, the entire Republic unsatisfying.

In Book 1 of the Republic, I think, there’s a somewhat disingenuous sleight-of-hand going on. Plato makes Thrasymakhos formulate his position as a definition of justice: justice is that which is to the advantage of the stronger party. This allows Socrates to easily tear it apart. But a real nihilistic position would not be a definition of justice, it would be the claim that there is no such thing as justice, that justice is merely a word, and that in the real world of human activity the stronger party forces the weaker to do its will and deceptively calls it justice. That is really what Socrates – and Plato – need to address, but Socrates doesn’t do that here.

To some extent Book 2 veers off into this territory, when the argument is taken up by Polemarkhos and Adeimantos, but it’s still framed on the basis of idealistic underpinnings that are assumed but not stated (not yet, at least). The discussion in Book 2 is whether it’s better for a person to be just or unjust, which assumes that people can be just and unjust and can act justly and unjustly and therefore that justice is a real thing.

In the course of the Repubic, Plato builds up a picture of justice, based on his philosophical idealism – the reality of abstract concepts, to put it crudely. But if you don’t buy into Plato’s theory of ideas, Plato hasn’t provided a philosophical underpinning for the idea of justice.

And Plato himself seems to think that justice can only exist in his perfect republic, which he admits is unlikely to come into existence (though he doesn’t give up hope that some tyrant might implement it). The dissonance between Plato’s idealistic picture of the just republic and what I see in the world around me make me skeptical of his entire project.

There are many brilliant insights and ideas in the Republic, and I would prefer not to be a nihilist, but in the end, for me at least, Plato’s idealism requires a leap of faith that I can’t quite make. And if, like me, you can’t make that leap, you’re back to trying to find an argument against nihilism.

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I think that it’s a mistake to imagine Plato’s search for truth as a progress from philosophical axioms to some grand theorem, as we might imagine a mathematician to do. In fact, he’s more like a physicist, working with models and observations. (In fact, mathematicians are closer to this as well, when they are doing their work, but most people only get to see the dressed up version at the end.)

Like a physicist, Plato starts off by assuming the ultimate reality of the thing that he is trying to understand. And then he tries to create a mental model that will allow him to reason about it in detail. A constant and basic assumption of his is that people have a good inner comprehension (or better “recognition”?) of these things, and it is our mental models that lead us astray. But we need mental models to create detailed predictions and go beyond a surface understanding. So, like a physicist, Plato stress tests the mental models he comes up with in edge cases to see if they make sense, and he isn’t too hung up on the exact logical/mathematical justification of every step. But he is interested in taking a model to the extreme and seeing how it fails – a basic physicist’s technique – and this explains a part of the otherwise strange looking arguments he engages in from time to time.

Plato’s main objection to Thrasymachus’s idea of justice is that someone who attains enough mastery of himself to become the perfect tyrant has necessarily attained enough mastery of himself to not desire tyranny at all. The rest of the book is a detailed look at what that self-mastery really looks like and consists in, not by a study of a utopia, but by a study of an uncompromising and radical city. The model has to be built of perfect pieces or it can’t be used to reason about perfect justice. And here, just as he says, the city is a model of the man, a bigger simpler version that lets us reason about the more detailed and intricate thing.

Now, all of Plato falls apart if we live in a truly imperfect world that holds no intercourse with anything perfect at all. And in the modern age, that’s a fairly easy belief to hold. I could give you a pretty good evolutionary/anthropological outline of why human societies believe what they do about justice. And it would probably look a lot like Thrasymachus’s outline.

But I wouldn’t argue that the physical world is precisely the world we live in. Human beings have a very low-bandwidth connection to the physical world. Our senses are highly imperfect, and sensory inputs are highly processed and modified before they trickle up to the conscious level. All that we deal with at the conscious level are abstractions of reality. Put anything that you think you know in front of a microscope to prove this to yourself. It will be unrecognizable. In fact, if you want a definition of man, you might describe a human being as a realtime pattern-matching and abstraction engine. Justice may not exist in the “real world” of atoms and molecules. But atoms and molecules are not our human world. Our souls, at least, are orientated in the other direction.

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"Plato makes Thrasymakhos formulate his position as a definition of justice: justice is that which is to the advantage of the stronger party. This allows Socrates to easily tear it apart. "–
No, it does not. Thrasymachus’ point is not refuted. Socrates’ victory is a fake one, and this is explicitly acknowledged at the beginning of Book 2.
So, the rest of the R. is written to make up for that.
However, it fails. Thrasymachus has not been philosophically refuted up to date. One evidence for this is that his modern intellectual successor, Nietzsche, sounds convincing.

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“a real nihilistic position would not be a definition of justice, it would be the claim that there is no such thing as justice, that justice is merely a word, and that in the real world of human activity the stronger party forces the weaker to do its will and deceptively calls it justice. That is really what Socrates – and Plato – need to address, but Socrates doesn’t do that here.” –
I see it differently. Both Socrates and Thrasymachus agree that justice must be somehow “advantageous” (συμφέρον) for the just. Otherwise there would be no point in pursuing it for its own sake. Pursuing justice for any ulterior motives, on the other hand, would be already unjust. So the task is to bring that “advantage” to light, so as to motivate people to be just. This is what Plato is attempting.