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Paul Haspel's Reviews > The Republic
The Republic
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“Republic,� it must be stipulated at the outset, is a Latin term (res publica, “public matter�), and therefore is really not the right way to translate the name of this quintessentially Greek dialogue by Plato. Its original Greek title, DZٱí or πολιτεία, typically means “constitution,� and might best be translated in this context as “the ideal state� � a term that Plato uses quite frequently throughout the dialogue. Yet by any name, Plato’s Republic remains one of the most important books ever written; and if you care about topics like the way in which the government of your country serves � or does not serve � its people, then you should make a point of reading The Republic.
The Republic stands out among Plato’s dialogues in a number of ways. For one thing, it is among the longest of the dialogues (368 pages in this Penguin Books edition, not counting appendices and notes). For another, it has quite the cast of characters. The setting is the home of Polemarchus, a prominent resident of the Athenian port of Piraeus, and the eleven participants in the dialogue include not only Socrates and Polemarchus but also Polemarchus� father Cephalus and brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus. Also along for the philosophical ride is the sophist Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, who here plays the role � one that will be familiar to readers of Plato’s dialogues � of sophist foil whose easy and facile assumptions are undone by Socrates� more open-minded and ethically focused inquiries.
The subject of their discussion is the DZٱí, the ideal state, and the shape that it would take; and from the beginning it seems clear that Plato is not trying to set forth a realistic blueprint for an actual, temporal society. In his discussion of the education that a small group of elite Guardians are to receive, in order that they may be wise and fearless defenders of the commonwealth, Plato’s Socrates declares that epic poems like Homer’s Iliad should be shorn of their grotesque and horrifying passages, as “the better they are as poetry the more unsuitable they are for the ears of children or men who are to be free and fear slavery more than death�.[T]he thrill of terror they cause will make our Guardians more nervous and less tough than they should be� (p. 78).
Does Plato really want to censor the Iliad? Almost certainly not; Homer’s poems were foundational texts for the classical Greek world, like the Bible for the medieval and early modern West. Rather, Plato’s purpose in this dialogue seems to be placing before the reader the contradictions that would be involved in moving from the imperfect states of the temporal realm to a theoretical “ideal� state.
At the same time, Plato’s theoretical state seems downright modern in many ways. Consider, for example, the way in which Plato’s Socrates declares that “We shall have to train the women also� in hitherto male-dominated skills like hunting and keeping watch, “and train them for war as well, and treat them in the same way as the men� (p. 161). Later in the same passage, Socrates states that as “it is natural for women to take part in all occupations as well as men�, accordingly “there will also be some women fitted to be Guardians� (pp. 165-66). A fairly radical declaration for the year 380 B.C. � 2300 years before the government of the United States of America recognized women’s right to vote � and one that puts Plato light-years ahead of his one-time pupil Aristotle when it comes to gender equity.
Central to The Republic is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. We hear so much about this allegory, in so many contexts, that any first-time reader of The Republic is bound to look forward to encountering the allegory in its original context for the first time. Yet the first-time reader of The Republic may not be ready for the violence of the metaphor, or for its focus on injustice and confinement:
“Imagine an underground chamber like a cave, with a long entrance open to the daylight and as wide as the cave. In this chamber are men who have been prisoners there since they were children, their legs and necks being so fastened that they can only look straight ahead of them and cannot turn their heads. Some way off, behind and higher up, a fire is burning, and between the fire and the prisoners and above them runs a road, in front of which a curtain-wall has been built, like the screen at puppet shows between the operators and their audience, above which they show their puppets" (p. 241).
As translator and commentator Desmond Lee of Cambridge University points out, a modern-day analogue for Plato's cave exists in television, as Plato seems to feel that the average person's "moral and intellectual opinions often bear as little relationship to the truth as the average film or television programme does to real life" (p. 240). Such considerations carry particular weight in a time when a recent U.S. president came to power in large part because large numbers of American voters connected with a mediatic public image conveyed via something called “reality television� (a contradiction in terms if ever there was one).
The “ideal state� in The Republic, as with other topics like rhetoric or law-making in other dialogues, is of interest here because the shape that a political state takes has everything to with the one topic that is always Plato’s core interest: “the most important of issues…the choice between a good and an evil life� (p. 317).
Accordingly, I read The Republic the same way I listen to John Lennon’s song “Imagine� (1971). When Lennon asked his listeners to “Imagine there’s no countries,� or to “Imagine no possessions…Nothing to kill or die for,� I don’t think he was expecting the citizens of his native Great Britain, or of his adopted U.S.A., to adopt such a program as a matter of practical constitutional policy. Rather, he no doubt hoped that his listeners would question an unthinking attachment to “traditional� values like nationalism, materialism, and militarism.
Similarly, I believe, Plato wanted his readers, whether they were Athenian or Spartan or whatever, to question the underlying assumptions of their own societies, and to work for change where they saw fit � keeping always in mind the goal of building a state that would encourage people to be virtuous. It is, heaven knows, a goal still worth pursuing today.
Desmond Lee’s classic translation, with further refinements by Rachana Kamtekar of the University of Michigan, is a great way to get to know a dialogue that is described on the dust jacket � accurately, I believe � as “the cornerstone of Western philosophy.�
The Republic stands out among Plato’s dialogues in a number of ways. For one thing, it is among the longest of the dialogues (368 pages in this Penguin Books edition, not counting appendices and notes). For another, it has quite the cast of characters. The setting is the home of Polemarchus, a prominent resident of the Athenian port of Piraeus, and the eleven participants in the dialogue include not only Socrates and Polemarchus but also Polemarchus� father Cephalus and brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus. Also along for the philosophical ride is the sophist Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, who here plays the role � one that will be familiar to readers of Plato’s dialogues � of sophist foil whose easy and facile assumptions are undone by Socrates� more open-minded and ethically focused inquiries.
The subject of their discussion is the DZٱí, the ideal state, and the shape that it would take; and from the beginning it seems clear that Plato is not trying to set forth a realistic blueprint for an actual, temporal society. In his discussion of the education that a small group of elite Guardians are to receive, in order that they may be wise and fearless defenders of the commonwealth, Plato’s Socrates declares that epic poems like Homer’s Iliad should be shorn of their grotesque and horrifying passages, as “the better they are as poetry the more unsuitable they are for the ears of children or men who are to be free and fear slavery more than death�.[T]he thrill of terror they cause will make our Guardians more nervous and less tough than they should be� (p. 78).
Does Plato really want to censor the Iliad? Almost certainly not; Homer’s poems were foundational texts for the classical Greek world, like the Bible for the medieval and early modern West. Rather, Plato’s purpose in this dialogue seems to be placing before the reader the contradictions that would be involved in moving from the imperfect states of the temporal realm to a theoretical “ideal� state.
At the same time, Plato’s theoretical state seems downright modern in many ways. Consider, for example, the way in which Plato’s Socrates declares that “We shall have to train the women also� in hitherto male-dominated skills like hunting and keeping watch, “and train them for war as well, and treat them in the same way as the men� (p. 161). Later in the same passage, Socrates states that as “it is natural for women to take part in all occupations as well as men�, accordingly “there will also be some women fitted to be Guardians� (pp. 165-66). A fairly radical declaration for the year 380 B.C. � 2300 years before the government of the United States of America recognized women’s right to vote � and one that puts Plato light-years ahead of his one-time pupil Aristotle when it comes to gender equity.
Central to The Republic is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. We hear so much about this allegory, in so many contexts, that any first-time reader of The Republic is bound to look forward to encountering the allegory in its original context for the first time. Yet the first-time reader of The Republic may not be ready for the violence of the metaphor, or for its focus on injustice and confinement:
“Imagine an underground chamber like a cave, with a long entrance open to the daylight and as wide as the cave. In this chamber are men who have been prisoners there since they were children, their legs and necks being so fastened that they can only look straight ahead of them and cannot turn their heads. Some way off, behind and higher up, a fire is burning, and between the fire and the prisoners and above them runs a road, in front of which a curtain-wall has been built, like the screen at puppet shows between the operators and their audience, above which they show their puppets" (p. 241).
As translator and commentator Desmond Lee of Cambridge University points out, a modern-day analogue for Plato's cave exists in television, as Plato seems to feel that the average person's "moral and intellectual opinions often bear as little relationship to the truth as the average film or television programme does to real life" (p. 240). Such considerations carry particular weight in a time when a recent U.S. president came to power in large part because large numbers of American voters connected with a mediatic public image conveyed via something called “reality television� (a contradiction in terms if ever there was one).
The “ideal state� in The Republic, as with other topics like rhetoric or law-making in other dialogues, is of interest here because the shape that a political state takes has everything to with the one topic that is always Plato’s core interest: “the most important of issues…the choice between a good and an evil life� (p. 317).
Accordingly, I read The Republic the same way I listen to John Lennon’s song “Imagine� (1971). When Lennon asked his listeners to “Imagine there’s no countries,� or to “Imagine no possessions…Nothing to kill or die for,� I don’t think he was expecting the citizens of his native Great Britain, or of his adopted U.S.A., to adopt such a program as a matter of practical constitutional policy. Rather, he no doubt hoped that his listeners would question an unthinking attachment to “traditional� values like nationalism, materialism, and militarism.
Similarly, I believe, Plato wanted his readers, whether they were Athenian or Spartan or whatever, to question the underlying assumptions of their own societies, and to work for change where they saw fit � keeping always in mind the goal of building a state that would encourage people to be virtuous. It is, heaven knows, a goal still worth pursuing today.
Desmond Lee’s classic translation, with further refinements by Rachana Kamtekar of the University of Michigan, is a great way to get to know a dialogue that is described on the dust jacket � accurately, I believe � as “the cornerstone of Western philosophy.�
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Reading Progress
November 3, 2015
– Shelved
November 3, 2015
– Shelved as:
to-read
November 3, 2015
– Shelved as:
election-day
November 3, 2015
– Shelved as:
politics
November 8, 2016
– Shelved as:
ancient-greece
January 19, 2017
–
Started Reading
February 23, 2017
–
Finished Reading
I like this takeaway from the volume because of the focus on change.
As I read it, a main point of the dialogue was not necessarily about what the Ideal definitively is but a conceptualization of the Ideal, a recognition and appreciation of its unobtainable status, and then the development and demonstration of a method of working toward the Ideal even if one never arrives there. It is less about what an Ideal looks like and more like a way of living that is always in dialogue with the Ideal.
Truly a foundational book.