I’m quoting from this translation by Tom Griffith: The Republic.
IN THE LAST POST we grappled with a bizarre consequence of the city-soul analogy in Plato’s Republic—it seemed the “justice” of the soul only comes at the expense of that of the city and likewise the other way around. Rubbing these seemingly logically incompatible scales together like fire-starting sticks created a dialectical friction which lit up an image of justice: the parts of the soul must be harmoniously arranged such that they act as one unified mind, and only after “getting one’s own house in order” can justice be achieved at larger scales. But this doesn’t speak to the possibility of justice at either scale. Is justice even possible?
What is human nature?
ARE WE SELFISH OR ALTRUISTIC? When presented with this binary choice, the answer seems clear: Pure altruism is a fantasy. Don’t get me wrong, altruism is real, but it’s never pure. Philanthropists get a tax break. Volunteers get warm and fuzzy feelings, a social outlet, and a bit of do-gooder superiority. Even saints have the salvation of their souls dangling like a carrot at the end of the stick, though hardly anyone would say this detracts from their saintliness. Consider it this way.
If someone approached you on the street and tried to hand you a twenty dollar bill claiming “no strings attached”, would you take it?
I hope not, because I think you’ll find that what from a distance appeared to be a twenty dollar bill is actually a flyer with the word Jesus written on it and by the time you realize this, it’s too late for you. A pack of child thieves has already made off with your wallet, emptied it of its contents, and tossed it into highway traffic where it is currently being flattened beyond recognition. Better luck next time.
Maybe I’m just being cynical. But it’s not unreasonable to be suspicious when there’s no apparent motive for such behavior. To have absolutely no self-interest motivating our actions is, well, inhuman. It’s almost unthinkable. Everyone is self-interested, and we would think anyone who claimed otherwise was either lying or seriously deluded. An infamous character in the Republic, Thrasymachus, would agree. But he’d take it a bit further. As he puts it:
Justice is the interest of the stronger.
Those who know better can see that what we call justice amounts to BS or lies disseminated by those in power to keep the mob in check. Justice doesn’t really exist, and those who believe in it are suckers.
Now that’s cynical.
And incoherent. Plato’s brother, Glaucon, offers an improvement: Justice is not its own reward, but a social contract we should all be thankful for. Yes, each of us wants to rule the world, but since no individual has the power to pull it off, we agree not to commit crimes against each other and in exchange we get to live in a world that is not quite so brutish, nasty, and short. Of course, crime would pay if we could get away with it, but we can’t. However, if an individual had the kind of power the Ring of Gyges bestows on its bearer, we would witness the dark truth about human nature. (If you haven’t read The Republic, think: Lord of the Rings.) Defend justice against that, Socrates!
But can’t we say we’re partially altruistic? C’mon now…
Surely this is true, but Plato isn’t one to snatch low hanging fruit. Instead he forces Socrates to take pure selfishness as given. However plausible it may be to think our natures neither wholly selfish nor wholly altruistic, this is nevertheless a weak position to argue from. Better to grant selfishness unlimited power and then prove, despite this, justice is real.
Not an easy task. It seems he would have to figure out how social justice could be entailed by the self-interest of its constituents. We would have to be social creatures such that it would simply be in our best interest to seek the common good. We would be like, “Altruism? Selfishness? What’re those?” These would never enter into our vocabulary. Altruism and self-interest would negate each other and disappear into the aether.
Well, Aristotle may have called us the social animal, but we aren’t that social!
And we face another problem like the one we grappled with in the last post. If agents align their self-interests in perfect harmony with the common good, they’re no longer agents but instead cogs in a machine driven by the society as a whole. But the very meaning of society necessarily entails a many-and-one structure—society can’t collapse into a simple unity without losing its social character. Social justice can’t be entailed by agents acting solely for the common good because then agents lose their status as agents, and society loses its group status and becomes the sole agent.
The many become one.
It appears self-interest must be maintained in at least two agents for social justice to exist at all.1
Sensational Organic Harmony
‘Take the example of someone hurting his finger. It is the whole community extending through the body and connecting with the soul, the soul being the ruling element that organizes the community into a single system - this entire community notices the hurt and together feels the pain of the part that hurts, which is why we say “the man has a pain in his finger.” The same applies to any other part of the human body, to the pain felt when a part of it is hurt or the pleasure felt when the part gets better.’
‘Certainly.’2
‘…When anything at all — good or bad — happens to one of its citizens, a city of this kind will be most inclined to say that what is affected is a part of itself. The whole city will rejoice together or grieve together.
‘…we also agreed that this is the greatest good for a city. We said a well-regulated city was like a body in the way it relates to the pain or pleasure of one of its parts.’ (464b)
IF YOU WANT ME TO CARE ABOUT YOU the way I care about myself, I had better literally feel your pain. The organism’s “social” glue is its collective experience of pain—the sensation is what motivates and unites the part to the functioning of the whole. The peculiar thing is, the sensation of pain belongs to the finger—it’s not nonsensical, after all, for your doctor to ask you where it hurts—even while being shared in equal measure with the whole organism.3
Already we can see that the brain’s activity can only be a part of the bigger picture.4 But we shouldn’t conclude from this that the organic whole amounts to the rational mind either. It’s not as though the mind can simply decide to disconnect from its body (though this might give us an idea of the difficulty involved in the philosopher’s exiting the cave and sheds light on why Socrates called philosophy a preparation for death). Even a pain as minor as a paper cut must be felt by the organic whole, and the mind is no exception. Not even a Super Spartan warrior wannabe like Socrates can will himself to stop feeling pain (and anyway macho-ness depends on it; no pain, no gain). To the degree the unhappy part is unhappy, the whole is unhappy. Try reasoning through some difficult problem while some part of you is in intense pain. No mind can escape the predicament of its organic whole. The mind has a role to play and can’t simply refuse to work.5
The functioning of the whole takes priority over its parts—everything depends on the soul.6
It appears we’ve come upon a living organization that unites the physical through the phenomenological. It’s hard to imagine a better social glue than the shared pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding sensations of the biological organism, since this explains the part’s motivation to achieve the common good. It seems we’ve edged closer to our outline of social justice. But.
Can we realize social harmony?
“…an individual human being is happy only if he lives in such a way as to further the happiness of his fellows.
It is worth pausing over this thesis, because it might be taken to suggest that justice is the sum of prudence and charity. But prudence aims at one’s own good as distinct from that of another, and charity aims at the good of another as distinct from one’s own. These virtues are the stock and trade of modern individualism: given the premise that a human being’s nature is to be understood individually, one is forced to interpret all ethical and political phenomena in terms of selfishness, egoism and altruism, greed and “brotherly love.” But this whole way of thinking is alien to Socrates. The good at which justice aims is essentially a shared good, as the end of cooperative activity is essentially a shared end. If we are the partners and helpers that Socrates describes, then the good of each of us is inseparable from the good of the others: this principle of cooperative activity is, he thinks, a principle of our nature.”
Anton Ford and Benjamin Laurence, The Parts and Whole of Plato’s Republic
CAN A HUMAN SOCIETY WORK THIS WAY? We do sacrifice ourselves for the collective at times, but we don’t literally feel each other’s pain. What about insect societies such as ants and bees? The Kallipolis, or Beautiful City, does seem eerily entomological with its functional specialization, communal parenting, state-sanctioned mating, and infanticide.7 Bug colonies exhibit a shocking level of cooperation; they’re stupid good at minding their own business. And yet, while I don’t doubt that ants feel pain, do they feel each other’s pain? It’s hard to believe they do. They don’t seem to give two farts about one of their own. Our auntie just got stepped on? I guess that answers the question of what’s for dinner. You, you, and you, help me grab Auntie Ant, the rest of y’all, back to work!
Comparing cooperative geometric puzzle solving in ants versus humans
“What is the source of such differences? An ant’s simplicity prevents her from solving the puzzle on her own but facilitates effective cooperation with nest-mates. A single person is cognitively sophisticated and solves the problem efficiently but this leads to interpersonal variation that stands in the way of efficient group performance.”
BUT WHAT DO I KNOW ABOUT THE FEELINGS OF ANTS? All I can say is, from some faraway place in outer space, maybe we don’t seem too different from them. We sacrifice ourselves for our own, and some of us might even come to the aid of a nearby stranger if called upon to do so, but when individuals in distant regions of society are hurt, we don’t feel much of anything. Maybe empathy or sympathy, if that. We certainly don’t share sensations in such a way as to unite our interests to each other and to the whole. That’s hard to imagine.
And it turns out even organic harmony falls short of the mark.
The problem is, we live in fluctuating world which only allows us to catch glimpses of realities neither here nor there. The flip side of this state of affairs is that each definition of justice in the Republic contains some partial truth, even if Socrates shoots them all down with equal force. Which means not even Thrasymachus’ perversion of justice can be entirely wrong. At the very least it tells us what justice might look like in a world that fails to fully instantiate it.
Platonic Entropy
“It is no easy matter for a city founded in this way to be altered. But since destruction awaits everything that has come to be, even a foundation of this kind will not survive for the whole of time.” 8
WE, TOO, MUST DIE. Insofar as the Republic is about political justice, it “draws its strength from a sense of loss.”9 The Beautiful City is in some ways like an organism since it carries within itself the seed of its own destruction. Generative expansion requires devolving into death. Corruption is planted in its very foundations, the clock set ticking. Conversely, what causes the breakdown of justice may be connected to the same natural force that drives its flourishing.
For us at least, that principle is excess. We want more. We always want more. It’s our seemingly trivial craving for better food and comfy couches that forces Socrates to hit the reset button on his restrained initial proposal. From then on, the Kallipolis unleashes itself into a fevered state of civil war. Throughout much of the Republic we get to watch the spectacle of ourselves blowing ourselves up from the inside.
But let’s not forget the first proposal for the just city (as many are wont to do).10 Socrates’ preferred peaceful commune, or the City of Pigs, gets discussed so briefly it’s easy to overlook, but it’s hugely important in throwing light on the Beautiful City. (Remember the fire-starting sticks!) Of course Socrates would prefer the vaguely Spartan Pig City life, but he does have his reasons. In the last post I quoted him responding to the complaint that the guardians weren’t getting any more than what they needed to survive:
“We shall say that we wouldn’t be at all surprised if even our guardians were best off like this…”
Why doesn’t he warn us that any excess beyond necessity will lead to disaster?! Why does he let Glaucon’s petty complaint derail the whole project? Well, clearly this is no accident. Plato veers us off course with an “accidental” sharp turn precisely to ensure the Beautiful City comes into view, knowing full well once we catch a glimpse of ourselves, there’s no going back.
If the Beautiful City is thought to be an ideal model of justice, it nevertheless falls short of a Platonic form. The City of Pigs comes closer, and the biological organism closer still, but presumably even these can only approximate the real deal. And yet somehow we can judge these models better or worse by what they fall short of, even if we don’t quite know what that is, even if what they approximate has yet to be clearly discerned.
The old charge of totalitarianism against the “Platonic ideal” continues to this day and is a complaint characteristic of the literal-minded who fail to notice the utopian nature of the Beautiful City—that its “good” lives no place. Utopias express a tainted or lost perfection: Things “could” (hypothetically) be good, but only if we could revert to a state “before” humanity got itself booted from the natural order. Animals almost have to juxtapose us in such scenarios. When Adam and Eve get kicked out of the Garden of Eden, there is no mention of the animals, not even the serpent, being cast out in their wake. Animals remain forever suspended in a kind of Neverland paradise. Why is that? Well, make no mistake, animals must have followed us out beyond the garden walls because here they are, forced to eat each other to survive. Notice, however, that they don’t slaughter each other by the millions or spread like a cancer over the entire globe like we do. And while they sometimes form groups which we might by some stretch of the imagination call “societies”, these tend to be simple family units that can’t even aspire to the complexity of our rustic City of Pigs. Unlike us, they take from the earth only what they need, and for that they get to stay, in some sense of that word, in the utopian garden of paradise. Whereas we spread like an all-consuming fire, hell bent on burning everything down with us. And yet, while we can admire animal moderation in a distant, abstract way, we will never give up our warmongering ways for their simpler lives.
On the other hand, if we’re so bad, why does Plato call this cancer upon the earth that is humanity “beautiful”? Perhaps it’s his way of pointing out that our excess, along with its disastrous results, is an expression of Nature too.
After all, a similar story is echoed even in our best model, the biological organism. We begin as almost nothing, but this nothing which becomes something grows bigger and drives to expand itself—at some point a harmonious order of scale is fleetingly achieved—but all the while a process of decline has been running in the background. Parts that have stopped minding their own business have been quietly sacrificed all along, a process we only notice when it reaches a fevered pitch and the disease gets its diagnosis.
Organic unity comes apart at the seams from the moment it gets set in motion.
Nothing in Nature escapes it, whatever it is. Inside us there lives the beginning of a kind of anarchy wherein for some reason a part chooses its own ‘self-interest’ over the common good and strikes out on its own, even if doing so leads to its own demise. Socrates might have been thinking of this degenerative process when he refused to flee prison to escape his death sentence. If Athens pronounced him a cancer to society, who was he to argue? He proclaimed that life outside her city walls would be for him no different from death and even went so far as to heroically hasten his own demise for her sake…but it was too late. Athens could not be saved.
This aspect of Nature can’t be ignored. The fact that Plato spends so much of the Republic elaborating the vainglorious City of Us suggests he thinks even death has a purpose. Perhaps Beauty requires a battle between excess and entropy—the greatest possible unity of the greatest possible diversity is a well-known aesthetic principle.11 Perhaps Justice bursts forth as Luminosity Itself from fevered dreams and reckless creativity playing itself against Time’s irreversibility. Does raging complexity spark a fire that continues burning long after everything is destroyed? Who knows.
If we were truly harmonized within ourselves and with the world, we would be social creatures.
Maybe justice really is a healthy organism, what’s good for its own sake is good for all. But as we saw earlier, it appears that the perfect dissolution of self-interest into altruism wipes out the many-and-one structure of societal composition. At the extreme limit of justice, there is no society. The many become one.
If that’s the case, what is justice? Or perhaps more importantly, what is the Organism?
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Related posts
Is the universe intelligent? A Platonic response to the indeterminacy of interpretation.
1) Do we know minds through behavior? Let’s take a hard look at the inference by analogy theory.
2) The boundaries of selfhood...and the problem of other minds.
3) What problem of other minds? An investigation into the origins of the Self.
4) Nested minds, selves within selves…Is there a Republic within you?
5) Organism as justice…Scaling up the harmony of the soul in Plato’s Republic.
6) What the demiurge has to say about causal closure... A top-down, bottom-up cosmology.
Timaeus Translations:
Peter Kalkavage: (FREE PDF. Full disclosure, he’s my husband’s friend, but that’s not why I recommend this translation). This is a great translation if you don’t mind sticking closely to the Greek and you’re concerned about accurately capturing Plato’s thought. The introductory essay and commentary throughout make this especially valuable. But it is a bit awkward and hard to read if you’re new to Plato.
Donald Zeyl: Super smooth. Introduction a bit uninspired. Some aspects are probably a bit wrong, but oh my, it’s so much easier than the translation I read in college. Get this one if you’re worried you won’t make it through.
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This might seem to tie into the Platonic-Pythagorean concepts of The One and The Indefinite Dyad, or as Plato called it, The Great and the Small, but maybe it’s safest to say I’m just making this up. :)
Perhaps Glaucon, Socrates’ interlocutor here, agrees with this a bit too quickly.
A more detailed account of sensation can be found in the Timaeus.
Plato associates the head with the rational element, the chest region with thumos or spiritedness (ego works too), and the lower abdominal region with craving or appetitive desire.
This point is confirmed in the Timaeus in a passage that may seem quaint in its details, but overall it reflects a surprisingly contemporary view of mental health.
These severe pleasures and pains drive him mad for the greater part of his life, and though his body has made his soul diseased and witless, people will think of him not as sick, but as willfully bad…And indeed, just about every type of succumbing to pleasure is talked about as something reproachable, as though the bad things are willfully done. But it is not right to reproach people for them, for no one is willfully bad. A man becomes bad, rather, as a result of one or another corrupt condition of his body and an uneducated upbringing. No one who incurs these pernicious conditions would will to have them….Furthermore when men whose constitutions are bad in this way have bad forms of government where bad civic speeches are given, both in public and in private, and where, besides, no studies that could remedy this situation are at all pursued by people from their youth on up, that is how all of us who are bad come to be that way—the products of two causes both entirely beyond our control. It is the begetters far more than the begotten, and the nurturers far more than the nurtured, that bear the blame for all this. Even so, one should make every possible effort to flee from badness, whether with the help of one’s upbringing or the pursuits or studies one undertakes, and to seize its opposite. But that is the subject for another speech. Timaeus, Trans. Donald Zeyl. 86d-87b.
The question of what the soul is gets elaborated in the Timaeus, and apparently there are two souls, one immortal and the other mortal! (69c-d).
Socrates talks about wasps and insects throughout the Republic, but here’s one instance: Glaucon complains when the philosopher must return to the cave, and Socrates has to remind him that they’re considering the well being of the whole city, not just one part. He then goes on to imagine telling the philosopher why he must return to the cave: “We’ll say that when such men come to be in the other cities it is fitting for them not to participate in the labors of those cities. For they grow up spontaneously against the will of the regime in each; and a nature that grows by itself and doesn’t owe its rearing to anyone has justice on its side when it is not eager to pay off the price of rearing to anyone. But you we have begotten for yourselves and for the rest of the city like leaders and kings in hives; you have been better and more perfectly educated and are more able to participate in both lives. So you must go down, each in his turn, into the common dwelling of the others and get habituated to seeing the dark things.” (520b) Republic, Allan Bloom translation. There’s a lengthy list of “drone” mentions in the index to this translation as well.
Book 8, 546. His reasons involve obscure Pythagorean mathematics that point to a seasonal or cyclical evolution of the universe.
Last line of the introduction from this translation by Tom Griffith: The Republic
Book 2, 369a-372c.
Art project idea: Take random objects and glue them together. Spray paint this assemblage one color. Voila! Art. (Seriously, it works.)
