Plato's Republic: Philosophy and Elenchus

Plato's Body of Work

• Socrates did not leave behind any writings.
• Plato and Xenophanes, who are Socrates' followers, did leave writings and document his teachings.
• Plato is the speaker across almost all of his works.
• After the execution of Socrates, Plato documented Socrates' dialogues and teachings in his books.
• The Republic has survived centuries and contains dialogues and ideas on daily life including the ideal state, military strategy, and trade.

Philosophy and the Elenchus

• Ethics, politics, aesthetics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of mind, science, epistemology, and metaphysics are all interconnected in philosophy.
• Philosophy is intended to bring justice to human beings and end civil war alongside political upheaval.
• Socrates' method of questioning is an Elenchus, meant to examine or refute, continuing until a satisfactory definition is achieved.
• Elenchus' goal extends beyond defining virtues or paradoxical doctrines related to weakness of will, aiming primarily at moral reform.
• The Republic explores the virtue of justice and whether it provides better happiness than injustice.

Socratic Paradoxes

• Socratic dialogues involve questioning people on conventionally recognized moral virtues like piety, courage and temperance.
• The conventionally distinguished virtues—justice, piety, courage—are identical to wisdom or knowledge, a type of craft or expertise known as the unity of the virtues doctrine.
• Possession of this knowledge is necessary and sufficient for happiness.
• No one knowingly acts contrary to what they believe to be best, making weakness of will impossible, which represents ethical intellectualism.

The Republic (Res Publica)

• Socrates' The Republic seeks a definition of justice that appeals to human psychology rather than perceived behavior.
• The Republic defines justice and to show that justice is worthwhile in and of itself.

Kallipolis

• Kallipolis is described as the ideal city or "beautiful or noble city".
• Socrates defends justice using the concept of Kallipolis, where philosopher-kings unite political power with philosophical knowledge of the transcendent good, allowing for just governance.
• The philosopher-kings are free from the distorting influence of power or ideology, making them immune to challenge.
• Justice is good because it is connected to the greatest good, the Form of the Good.

The Form of The Good

• Knowledge and truth are considered beautiful things.
• In the visible world, light and sight are considered similar to the sun, but are not the sun.
• Knowledge and truth are goodlike, but not the good.
• The Form of the Good is an illuminating object shedding light on other objects of knowledge, acting as a condition of their intelligibility.

Justice and Specialization

• Justice requires each person to fulfill their societal role as determined by their nature, without interfering in other areas.
• Strong specialization mirrors justice in society, while weak specialization is its essence within a soul.
• A soul is just when its three parts (reason, spirit, appetite) align, mirroring a city where rulers, guardians, and producers function harmoniously.
• Kallipolis demands lifelong exclusive practice in producing, guardianship, or ruling, aligning with cognitive development.

The Ideal Classes

• Society consists of three classes: producers, auxiliaries, and guardians
• Justice in society exists when relations between these three classes are right.
• Each group has an appropriate function, with rulers ruling, auxiliaries upholding convictions, and producers using their skills.
• Producers are dominated by appetites, warriors by spirits, and rulers by rational faculties, making them philosopher kings.
• Producers, guardians, and philosopher-kings cooperate in a just system by trading products, protection, and knowledge respectively.
• Individuals can progress toward "the good" via education, based on their innate desires.
• Plato's city is both ethically and prudentially ideal, being both just and happy.

Individual Justice

• Individual justice mirrors political justice, with the soul having a structure analogous to the three classes of society.
• The rational part of the soul seeks truth, the spirited part desires honor, and the appetitive part lusts after desires, especially money.
• A just individual mirrors a just society, with the soul's parts achieving requisite power and influence relationships.
• The entire soul aims at fulfilling the desires of the rational part, similar to how a just society fulfills the rulers' will.

Theory of Forms

• The Theory of the Forms is shown through a series of three analogies, the allegories of the sun, the line, and the cave.
• The world is divided into the visible, grasped with senses, and the intelligible, grasped with the mind.
• The visible is the universe, while the intelligible is composed of abstract, changeless absolutes like goodness, beauty, and redness.
• Forms serve as objects of knowledge, embodying unchanging truth apprehended by the mind, not senses.
• Philosophers can grasp the Forms.
• The Form of the Good is the source of all other Forms, knowledge, truth, and beauty, relating to the intelligible realm as the sun does to the visible.
• The allegory of the cave portrays the philosopher's journey through cognition stages, from the visible to the intelligible.
• Education aims to instill right desires, filling the soul with a lust for truth, moving toward the Form of the Good.
• Justice is worthwhile for its own sake.
• The just soul is healthy, happy, untroubled and calm, whereas injustice causes torture to the psyche.
• A philosopher can judge on the three different character types because he has achieved all there types of pleasures:
  • Money-loving
  • Honour-loving
  • Truth-loving

Philosophy and Art

• An ideology-free environment for guardians and producers strengthens Kallipolis.
• Honor-lovers and money-lovers receive benefits from being free of ideology.
• Education is the most important political institution.
• Philosophers, not poets, are true teachers of virtue.
• Art can satisfy repressed desires harmlessly.
• Poetry makes society unjust, which is why the the poets are banished from the city, because they imitate unjust inclinations

The Nature of Relativism

• Plato’s theory of Forms stands as a key defense against relativists like Thrasymachus.
• Thrasymachus posits that justice is determined by the strongest.
• Plato claims that justice is only what you see.
• Plato: People with relativism are "stuck in the world of sights and sounds".
• The abstract principles is the intelligible world; which is perfect and unchanging.
• The visible world is imperfect, which results in true belief.
• The intelligible world is perfect, which results in higher form of knowledge than true belief.
• The Form of Justice is absolute and incontrovertible, though its instances in the visible world may be relative.
• Metaphors suggests he is not persuasion
• The Form of the Good is considered an "unhypothetical first principle".
• Without The Form of the Good, there would be nothing to justify any of our reasoning.

The Tripartite Soul

• The "tripartite soul" explains inner conflict and the necessity for honing reason.
• Dividing the soul into rational, spirited, and appetitive parts explains how shameful or vicious actions result from giving into desires.
• Virtuousity involves following reason with spirit and appetite under control.

Plato's Theory of the Soul

• Philosopher-kings establish a political system rooted in socialization and education, based on Plato's theory of the soul.
• Each type of desire rules the soul of a person, determining their values and conceptions of what brings happiness.
• Ethical education aims to socialize desires away from falsely believed happiness and toward true happiness.

Recollection

• The Doctrine of Recollection presupposes the immortality of the soul.
• Due to resemblence of forms, perceptible objects possess the characteristic of beauty.
• Mathematical sciences represents a deductive system of axioms, definitions, and theorems; a model of what philosophy might be.

Freedom and Autonomy

• Freedom to do what we want is instrumental freedom.
• A state should limit individual freedom only to guarantee equal freedom to all its members.
• A state that guaranteed deliberative freedom might look and feel very repressive to someone solely concerned about instrumental freedom.
• Kallipolis is intended to provide its members with as much deliberative freedom as their natures, fully developed in optimal conditions.

Criticisms

• Socrates is authoritarian or totalitarian, which is anti-democratic, censorship, propaganda, banishing all poets.
• Karl Popper said The Republic was the seminal influence behind the 20th century totalitarian regimes of Stalin and Hitler.
• The Republic is a rigorous examination of political philosophy in the western tradition and modern liberal democracy.
• The Republic is an attempt to design a city whose members enjoy as much real happiness and freedom as possible.