Republic Book 5

Just when you thought that Socrates had finished describing the details of his theoretical city and we were ready to move onto more interesting and more philosophical territory, Book 5 returns to add even more laws and prescriptions.  Socrates' companions demand that he elaborate on what he meant when he said that the guardians should possess wives and children in common (423e).  Most of the chapter is then consumed by a relatively boring discussion of the rules of guardian communism.  It's only towards the end, after he's described how it's not only possible and even natural to share wives and children, but also the best thing for the city, that Socrates gets back to more philosophical territory (473c2).  He argues that the single biggest thing we can do to actually bring this utopia into existence would be to put the philosophers in charge of the city.  We need a philosopher king (473c8).  While this conclusion is hardly surprising, the way he reaches it brings up some interesting material.

Socrates begins his incendiary discussion of group marriage by first establishing that women can be guardians too.  Oddly, however, this isn't because men and women are equal.  Socrates is clear that women are generally inferior in every respect (455d2).  Nevertheless, they have the same 'nature' as the men, which is to say that they are made of the same stuff, the same mix of metals.  In what appears to be an argument (perhaps by necessity) for some sort of relative scale of metallic purity, Socrates claims that women should have all the same jobs as the men.

Then there is no way of life concerned with the management of the city that belongs to a woman because she's a woman or to a man because he's a man, but the various natures are distributed in the same way in both creatures. Women share by nature in every way of life just as men do, but in all of them women are weaker than men. 
Certainly.
Then shall we assign all of them to men and none to women?
How can we?
We'll say, I suppose, that one woman is a doctor, another not, and that one is musical by nature, another not.
Of course.
And, therefore, won't one be athletic or warlike, while another is unwarlike and no lover of physical training? 
I suppose so.
Further, isn't one woman philosophical or a lover of wisdom, while another hates wisdom? And isn't one spirited and another spiritless? 
That too.
So one woman may have a guardian nature and another not, for wasn't it qualities of this sort that we looked for in the natures of the men we selected as guardians?
Certainly.
Therefore, men and women are by nature the same with respect to guarding the city, except to the extent that one is weaker and the other stronger. (455d5)

"Weaker" here seems to be synonymous with 'worse', not simply opposed to 'physically strong'.  So the hierarchy of women seems to be like a parallel double of the hierarchy already described for the men in the myth of the metals.  While an odd way to empower women by modern standards, this type of analogy is eminently Platonic.

Once we have female guardians, we need to know how they interact with the men and how children are reared.  At this point the discussion shades in a Nazi eugenic direction.  Basically Socrates wants all the guardians to think that they share wives and children completely in common, but to arrange a cunning mating system that allows the best guardian men to breed more often with the finest women.  The whole apparatus is to be disguised as some sort of ritual lottery so that no one catches on (460a5).  How we're supposed to deal with the fact that so many kids are mysteriously born with the same little dictator mustache is not discussed.  To make a long story short, the rules for sex, child rearing and war laid out in the whole long section (up through 471c) all aim at making sure the guardians operate as a single unit, like one big happy family, without any internal factions.  None of them are allowed to possess anything not shared with the whole family.  While this sort of structure is naturally a controversial social topic, there's not really anything philosophically interesting in Plato's treatment of it.  He's basically just reversing the initial analogy between a city and person.

As I observed at the outset, things only get interesting again when Socrates proposes that the first step in creating the just city is to put the philosopher's in charge (473c8).  Because at that point he has to first define what it is that distinguishes philosophy from other crafts.  The first distinguishing mark of the philosopher is that he is a lover of wisdom in its entirety, including all types of learning (475c7).  This, however, is not specific enough.  For the philosopher to truly separate himself from the dilettante, he has to rise beyond loving all particular kinds of learning and love wisdom itself, to love the unity of learning we call the pursuit of truth.  The philosopher is the one who wants to find the hidden unity of the Forms of learning and wisdom and beauty that lie beneath the various ways these manifest themselves in particular things.  

Since the beautiful is the opposite of the ugly, they are two.
Of course.
And since they are two, each is one?
I grant that also.
And the same account is true of the just and the unjust, the good and the bad, and all the forms. Each of them is itself one, but because they manifest themselves everywhere in association with actions, bodies, and one another, each of them appears to be many. (476)

Non-philosophers, like dreamers, see the many manifestations and take them for all of reality.  Philosophy begins by waking up to the fact that these many manifestations are mere images, mere likenesses, of single unitary Forms (476c-d).  Basically, if you don't believe in the theory of Forms, you can't be a philosopher.

The final pages of the chapter attempt to head off potential objection to this definition of philosophy.  Why can't one love wisdom and learning without believing in Plato's Forms?  Why isn't it okay to know and love a lot of different things?  In short, because the Forms are the only objects of true knowledge, while the myriad manifestations of the world are the objects of opinion.  To modern ears, this argument doesn't sound at all convincing; at best it seems just a restatement of the theory of Forms, and so wouldn't provide a non-circular ground to that theory.  But it may have sounded more plausible to Greek ears because of a peculiarity in the use of the verb "to be".

"Tell us, does the person who knows know something or nothing?" You answer for him.
He knows something.
Something that is or something that is not?
Something that is, for how could something that is not be known?  
Then we have an adequate grasp of this: No matter how many ways we examine it, what is completely is completely knowable and what is in no way is in every way unknowable? (476e6)

The translators note that the verb here could be construed in a number of ways.

Because of the ambiguity of the verb einai ("to be"), Socrates could be asking any or all of the following questions: (1) "Something that exists or something that does not exist?" (existential "is"); (2) "Something that is beautiful (say) or something that is not beautiful?" (predicative "is"); (3) "Something that is true or something that is not true?" (veridical "is"). (pg. 1103)

Plato will often slur together the good, the beautiful, the virtuous, the wise, and the true.  To this list we can add the knowable and 'that which is'.  If, as the translator's suggest, the very form 'to be' for the Greeks was identical to veridical predicability, then Socrates' attempt to justify his definition of philosophy by linking the Forms to knowledge takes on a new light.  Perhaps for the ancient Greeks, to know something is to know that something is X -- true, or beautiful, or existent ... real.  Hence what is (real) is knowable, and what is knowable is (real).  Likewise, you cannot know the unreal, that which is not, which is the domain of ignorance.  In between these two lies the realm of opinion, which deals with things that neither completely are nor are not (478d).  

Socrates goes on to use the fact that we know what is, we are ignorant of what is not, and we opine about things in between, in order to justify the idea that the Forms are acceptable object of knowledge as such.  The final step follows from the same 'veridical predicability' form of 'to be'.  If something is X, then it surely is not not-X at the same time.  But anything we encounter in the world of things could be truly described by either an adjective or its opposite so long as we're describing it relative to another thing.

I want to address a question to our friend who doesn't believe in the beautiful itself or any form of the beautiful itself that remains always the same in all respects but who does believe in the many beautiful things—the lover of sights who wouldn't allow anyone to say that the beautiful itself is one or that the just is one or any of the rest: "My dear fellow," we'll say, "of all the many beautiful things, is there one that will not also appear ugly? Or is there one of those just things that will not also appear unjust? Or one of those pious things that will not also appear impious?"
There isn't one, for it is necessary that they appear to be beautiful in a way and also to be ugly in a way, and the same with the other things you asked about.
What about the many doubles? Do they appear any the less halves than doubles?
Not one.
So, with the many bigs and smalls and lights and heavies, is any one of them any more what we say it is than its opposite?
No, each of them always participates in both opposites.
Is any one of the manys what we say it is, then, any more than it is not what he says it is?
No, they are like the ambiguities one is entertained with at dinner parties or like the children's riddle about the eunuch who threw something at a bat—the one about what he threw at it and what it was in, for they are ambiguous, and one cannot understand them as fixedly being or fixedly not being or as both or as neither.

Then do you know how to deal with them? Or can you find a more appropriate place to put them than intermediate between being and not being? (479)

We can never say that anything is truly beautiful or small or light or even half in itself.  These qualities all require a relative scale or more and less.  Something isn't beautiful, period, it's only more beautiful than, and also appears ugly when set beside something else.  Only the Form of Beauty is beautiful in itself.  Only Beauty is purely beautiful.  So only the Forms actually fit the Greek definition of 'being', where they are truly just X and not also simultaneously not-X.  In other words, the Forms are the only things that are, and hence the only things that can be known.  Everything else vacillates between being (X) and not being (X).  We can have opinions about those types of things, but not knowledge.  And since philosophy is all about gaining knowledge, the theory of Forms is the only philosophy.  QED.  Except for the fact that philosophy was supposed to be the love of wisdom, not the knowledge of it.  It seems like Socrates has pulled a fast one on us here.

Republic Book 4

With Book 4, Socrates finally returns to his main argument and uncovers a definition of justice that applies to both a city and, by analogy, to an individual.  Justice, in short, is everybody doing everything they are supposed to do and nothing that they are not supposed to do.  Each part performing only its own function, being only itself, produces a single harmonious whole.  Justice, however, is not the harmony created by the interaction of the parts.  That is moderation (431e7).  Justice is the distinction of the parts themselves, the purification of the metals that allows them to be combined into an alloyed whole.  So, basically, justice is precisely the division of labor with which Socrates began his thought experiment about founding a city.  To preserve this 'natural' division as a city grows into a confusing mixture, it must be purified into the caste system he ended up describing.  It's pretty obvious how this fits with the theory of Forms.  The Forms purify the mixtures we find in the world into elements that are only themselves, and not also, partly and in another respect, something else.  Plato's metaphysics perfectly reflect his political and moral beliefs.  They are all about re-establishing a pure aristocratic order by drawing new lines of descent that organize a tangled world.  This casts Socrates detour into a description of the 'luxurious' city in a new light.  Exactly like the myth of the metals indicated, the fundamental problem at stake is purifying a mixture.  Only after we've succeeded in finding the pure Forms can we worry about preserving them unalloyed.

In the first section of this chapter (up to 427d1), Socrates puts the finishing touches on his imaginary city.  Having gone into detail on the education of the guardians, he now pulls back to show us that there are few concrete rules that govern the city beyond those he has already discussed.  With the correct upbringing, the guardians will naturally preserve the most essential aspect of the city, its unity.  From the overarching principle that the city remain one, we can deduce most of its other aspects.  The happiness of any individual part, even of the guardians, is not as important as the happiness of the whole unit (421b3).  The city should be neither too rich nor too poor (422a1) nor should it grow so large that it develops factions (423b8).  And above all, the city should preserve the educational system that Socrates outlines (423e2).  In a sort of political dialectic, this indoctrination holds the city together while at the same time separating and purifying each of its parts.  

Once he's finally completed the description of the luxurious city that began on 372e2, Socrates returns to the original question and begins searching for the way justice arises in a city.  Though it's the climax of the argument so far, the results have been so telegraphed that it feels like a bit of a let down to discover how the city he's described is wise, courageous, moderate (sophrosune), and just.  Wisdom lies in the guardians being in charge, since they are the ones who know how to run the city.  Courage too, lies entirely with the guardian class, since they are also the ones who know "what is to be feared" (429b8), and because of their strict upbringing, are capable of preserving the ideals of the city, come what may.  Moderation, as we mentioned at the beginning, is the harmony created by each part of the whole playing its role (431e5), maintaining the relationship of ruler and ruled.  And Justice is the very distinction of parts, the creation of the classes that allow all the other virtues to get off the ground (433c4).  Socrates' final definition of Justice simplifies the four metals into three classes.

Then, that exchange and meddling is injustice. Or to put it the other way around: For the money-making, auxiliary, and guardian classes each to do its own work in the city, is the opposite. That's justice, isn't it, and makes the city just? (434c6)

Finding how Justice arose in a city was only a means to an end though; we were originally (368c) looking for the definition of a just individual.  Socrates shifted the question to the political sphere by suggesting we should look for large print versions of the letters we wished to learn.  In the end (as Abrams described) it doesn't matter how big or small the print is, or even what typeface we use, since a letter preserves its symbolic form despite all these transformations (435a5).  All we need to do, then, to uncover justice in an individual, is to find an analogy with the way a just city works.  So Socrates spends the rest of the chapter establishing that the individual soul is composed of three parts -- rational, spirited, and appetitive -- that interact just like the three classes -- guardian, auxiliary, and money-maker -- do in the just city.  Again, with all this setup, the conclusion is pretty anticlimactic.  Like the just city, the just individual keeps the three parts of his soul distinct yet complementary, separated apart yet gathered together.

One who is just does not allow any part of himself to do the work of another part or allow the various classes within him to meddle with each other. He regulates well what is really his own and rules himself. He puts himself in order, is his own friend, and harmonizes the three parts of himself like three limiting notes in a musical scale—high, low, and middle. He binds together those parts and any others there may be in between, and from having been many things he becomes entirely one, moderate and harmonious. Only then does he act. And when he does anything, whether acquiring wealth, taking care of his body, engaging in politics, or in private contracts—in all of these, he believes that the action is just and fine that preserves this inner harmony and helps achieve it, and calls it so, and regards as wisdom the knowledge that oversees such actions. And he believes that the action that destroys this harmony is unjust, and calls it so, and regards the belief that oversees it as ignorance. (443d1) 

Since the analogy with the city makes the conclusions of this section repetitious, the only thing really interesting here lies in the way that Socrates goes about establishing that the analogy holds.  It's not obvious that the individual soul should have three parts nor that they should be organized as ruler, helper, and ruled (436a6).  In order to establish the analogy, Socrates has to, in effect, purify the concept of the individual soul into these three forms.  He goes about this in an interesting way.  First, he gives us a general principle of purification that asserts:

It is obvious that the same thing will not be willing to do or undergo opposites in the same part of itself, in relation to the same thing, at the same time. So, if we ever find this happening in the soul, we'll know that we aren't dealing with one thing but many. (436b7)

Notice the repeated use of "same" here.  If we purify something to the point where it is 'the same as itself' in every respect, if we find the thing in-itself, then it will not be pulled in two directions at once.  Once purified, each thing is unitary, and has a single state at any given time.  After this purification of a thing in itself, context can be added back and new relations and changes can be considered that appear to make the thing swing between opposites.  Socrates introduces this abstract principle in order to assert that thirst, in itself, only desires drink, in itself.  This thesis is meant to contradict the idea that we don't thirst in the abstract, but we thirst for something particular, namely, whatever particular thing we feel like would be a tasty beverage.  All this is laid out in an interesting passage where Plato seems to explicitly acknowledge that he is contradicting the way he defined power as the power to do something good for oneself in Gorgias (438a7).  So it seems like Plato feels this is a vulnerable point in his argument.  If our appetites like thirst are for something concrete, if they don't exist in a vacuum based on a set of abstract needs but always already as part of some contextual assemblage, then we don't need to invoke a complicated multi-part theory of the soul to explain why we're thirsty, but not for that shit.  In which case the logic Socrates uses to prove that there is a rational part of the soul which governs a purely animalistic appetitive one would fall apart.

Therefore a particular sort of thirst is for a particular sort of drink. But thirst itself isn't for much or little, good or bad, or, in a word, for drink of a particular sort. Rather, thirst itself is in its nature only for drink itself.
Absolutely.
Hence the soul of the thirsty person, insofar as he's thirsty, doesn't wish anything else but to drink, and it wants this and is impelled towards it.
Clearly.
Therefore, if something draws it back when it is thirsting, wouldn't that be something different in it from whatever thirsts and drives it like a beast to drink? It can't be, we say, that the same thing, with the same part of itself, in relation to the same, at the same time, does opposite things. (439a2)

So again, the crucial idea is this principle of the separation, distinction, and purification of a confusing mixed-up world.

Republic Book 3

Most of Book 3 is a pretty boring continuation of the same parenthesis that Socrates opened last chapter with his discussion of the luxurious city (372d3).  Recall that once we exceed the limits of the simple and healthy city, and develop a luxurious city, we need more land and more people, hence we need "guardians" of this land.  For most of this chapter Socrates rambles on about how to house and educate these guardians.  The individual rules he lays out are pretty forgettable; the main point is simply that these men are supposed to represent the perfect embodiment of the concept of harmony.  In the final pages though , the chapter takes an interesting turn (412b8).  Socrates asks, in effect, who guards the guardians?  Which guardians will form an elite ruling core within the ranks of the guardians, who are already a sequestered elite within the city?  In this context, he introduces the famous noble lie,  the myth of the metals.  The idea is to tell people that, although everyone in the city is a brother born to the same earth mother, there is nevertheless a natural hierarchy among them based on whether their souls contain gold (ruling guardians), silver (auxiliary guardians), iron (craftsmen), or bronze (farmers).  The myth adds a new twist to the parenthesis opened earlier, because it (along with the hint at 399e4) suggests that Plato may not return to discuss the problem of how justice arises in the simple healthy city he first described.  Instead, the problem has morphed into how to purify an existing unjust city from within.  The auxiliaries and guardians he has spent so much time describing have a function beyond the one initially advertised for them.  They are the purifiers of the luxurious city, the ones who collect and purify the gold contained within it.  The end result of this process is not only the production of justice in the luxurious city, but the reproduction of the ruling guardians themselves. 

For completeness, let me briefly note the principle rules Socrates suggests for the education of guardians.  He continues the discussion of which stories the guardians should hear as youths by asking which are most likely to instill in them the qualities they will need to defend and rule the city.  They have to be courageous, so they should hear stories that will make them unafraid of dying in battle.  They shouldn't fear or feel sentimental about loss, so they should never hear stories where the hero becomes distraught over the death of a companion.  Laughter, Socrates claims, is a close cousin to violence, so the guardians also should spend much time with comedies.  Lying is bad, so the guardians must learn to be honest (though of course we've already seen Socrates suggest that deceit can be used for a good purpose by the rulers).  The guardians must be the personification of moderation, so we shouldn't tell them stories that depict drunkenness or gluttony or other overwhelming passions.  They also shouldn't care a whit about money, so we need to ban any stories suggesting that heroes or gods can be bribed by money or sacrifice.  

To cap off this elaborate list of banned books (which stretches all the way back into Book 2) Socrates asks how we should handle stories about human beings.  This might seem an odd question at this stage, but the examples he's given come from Homer or other myths, so they describe gods, and heroes and spirits and such.  Perhaps surprisingly, Socrates says we need to withhold judgement on these stories for the time being.

Because I think we'll say that what poets and prose-writers tell us about the most important matters concerning human beings is bad. They say that many unjust people are happy and many just ones wretched, that injustice is profitable if it escapes detection, and that justice is another's good but one's own loss. I think we'll prohibit these stories and order the poets to compose the opposite kind of poetry and tell the opposite kind of tales. Don't you think so?
I know so.
But if you agree that what I said is correct, couldn't I reply that you've agreed to the very point that is in question in our whole discussion? 
And you'd be right to make that reply.
Then we'll agree about what stories should be told about human beings only when we've discovered what sort of thing justice is and how by nature it profits the one who has it, whether he is believed to be just or not. (392b9)

This clearly foreshadows the myth of the metals which concludes the chapter.  Gods and heroes and such are in sense all cut from the same cloth.  As inherent protagonists, stories about them always need to show them in a positive light.  Men, however, come in all different mixtures.  To know which ones to praise and which to blame, we will first need a story about justice itself that lets us classify and order them according to some principle.  The myth of the metals will provide exactly this story.  In the present educational context, we can see clearly how, as a myth, the story of the metals is not meant so much to describe justice as to be a tool for producing it in our youth.  These will naturally grow into exactly the sort of adults who can define justice.  There's always a circularity at the core of Platonism.

After he finishes discussing content, Socrates goes on to prescribe even the style that storytellers, and even musicians would be forced to use.  First person narration -- a form of imitative identification -- is fine if the author is discussing something praiseworthy, but actions we frown upon should only be related from the third person perspective (396e2) so that the reader avoids any identification with the character.  Musical modes that lend themselves to sad songs or drinking songs should be avoided, as well as many alternations of rhythm.  These heavy handed restrictions are all ultimately aimed at cultivating our guardians' love of simple rhythms and harmonies (401d3).   With a comprehensive knowledge of the few building blocks Socrates has left for them, the guardians will see the entire world as a book containing various combinations of the primitive Forms.  An alphabet of what it means to think (D&R pg 181)?

It's just the way it was with learning how to read. Our ability wasn't adequate until we realized that there are only a few letters that occur in all sorts of different combinations, and that—whether written large or small—they were worthy of our attention, so that we picked them out eagerly wherever they occurred, knowing that we wouldn't be competent readers until we knew our letters.
True.
And isn't it also true that if there are images of letters reflected in mirrors or water, we won't know them until we know the letters themselves, for both abilities are parts of the same craft and discipline?
Absolutely.
Then, by the gods, am I not right in saying that neither we, nor the guardians we are raising, will be educated in music and poetry until we know the different forms of moderation, courage, frankness, high- mindedness, and all their kindred, and their opposites too, which are moving around everywhere, and see them in the things in which they are, both themselves and their images, and do not disregard them, whether they are written on small things or large, but accept that the knowledge of both large and small letters is part of the same craft and discipline? (402a8)

Socrates then moves on to describe the physical training of the guardians, and their relationship to doctors and lawyers.  The guardians must of course be strong and fit, but in the manner of a soldier, not an athlete.  Since it's important for them to be able to handle any physical circumstance, they are trained very much in the style of the Spartans.  There's a lot of sleeping and eating little to go with skipping deserts and ladies.  And while a guardian may occasionally get sick and require a doctor, none of these folks will ever be allowed to be chronically sick because this would be the sign of a weak and unhealthy character.  Finally, Socrates doesn't think a guardian is ever likely to need a lawyer, though he may end up as a judge someday.  

Socrates finally sums up his description of the education and habits of the guardians as a way of creating a superior harmony in their souls.  They must cultivate their taste in music and poetry according to the rules he laid down earlier.  They must also cultivate the physical strength and 'spiritedness' in battle.  Neither of these activities must be allowed to unbalance the other.  The goal, however, is not so much a harmony of body and soul, as a harmony within a soul which includes both a spirited and contemplative part.  

It seems, then, that a god has given music and physical training to human beings not, except incidentally, for the body and the soul but for the spirited and wisdom-loving parts of the soul itself, in order that these might be in harmony with one another, each being stretched and relaxed to the appropriate degree.
It seems so.
Then the person who achieves the finest blend of music and physical training and impresses it on his soul in the most measured way is the one we'd most correctly call completely harmonious and trained in music, much more so than the one who merely harmonizes the strings of his instrument. (411e3)

I note in passing that middle Plato is much more contemptuous of the body than he was in the earlier Socratic dialogs.  The soul is shifting from the most important things to the only thing of importance.  The truly harmonious musical soul here seems to acquire a body almost of its own right.

Book 3 concludes with the myth of the metals, which I am provisionally taking as the ) we have been looking for since 377d9.  As I explained at the outset, the context is that we need to decide who will lead the guardians.  We'd like to choose the guardians who are the most skilled and loyal, and these two criteria actually merge together in Socrates' job description.  The ideal guardian will be the one who most completely and steadfastly loves the city and identifies his own benefit with the benefit of the city (412d3).  So the first thing this guardian must guard against is any shaking of his conviction in this identification (412e4).  In other words, the ruling guardians (the true 'guardians', now distinguished from 'auxiliaries') are the ones who best guard their own convictions.  Since all the guardians have been brought up with the conviction that the city and the people in it are wonderful and harmonious, mostly we just need to find the guardians who are least likely to forget this conviction under pressure of "theft, magic spells, or compulsion" (413b1).  These boil down to a guardian being talked out of his conviction by some specious argument, or otherwise lured or forced away from it by pleasure (perhaps bribes) or pain (perhaps torture).  So finding the true guardians involves constantly testing who clings most tightly to their love of the city.

We must keep them under observation from childhood and set them tasks that are most likely to make them forget such a conviction or be deceived out of it, and we must select whoever keeps on remembering it and isn't easily deceived, and reject the others. Do you agree? (413c8)

The myth of the metals (414d1-415c9) is a story about how this selection process works.  The idea is to create a self-perpetuating cycle where people who are told the story believe it, and in believing it, act according to its logic, which in turn actually makes the story come true.  So the story is at the same time about how the city came to be structured as it is, and an active device for structuring it that way.  This noble lie is the 'true falsehood' we saw last chapter (382a4).  If possible, Socrates would like the falsehood to be so true that it is hidden even from the rulers themselves.

How, then, could we devise one of those useful falsehoods we were talking about a while ago, one noble falsehood that would, in the best case, persuade even the rulers, but if that's not possible, then the others in the city? (414b8)

He doesn't go quite as far as saying that a guardian's conviction in the truth of the myth of the metals is actually the perfect final test of their ability to guard themselves and the city, but this would be a straightforward implication.  The people who win any game tend to think it's a fair test of skill.  Only the losers complain about luck and chance.  So it seems pretty plausible that a guardian who grew up with this story, and whose soul later proved to contain gold, would convince themselves, and if possible everyone else, of its truth.  In promoting this true falsehood that tells, "the most important part of himself about the most important things" (382a7), that speaks, "to one's soul about the things that are" (382b3), and that leaves, "ignorance in the soul of someone who has been told a falsehood" (382b7), the guardian actually converts the false into the true.  Or maybe it would be better to say that he purifies the false to find its kernel of truth.  The myth tells of a process of purifying gold from the metals mixed in a city.  It's retelling would reproduce the guardians.  And the ability to select these guardians constitutes the purification of the luxurious city and its ordering along just and rational lines.  This is how Plato closes his parenthesis.  We don't find the Form of Justice alone, embodied nakedly, so to speak, in a simple, healthy city.  That city is myth.  In its place though, we introduce another myth that can purify Justice from the actual city we know, which is a messy, luxurious, and mixed place.  What are the Forms if not the purification of the mixed things we find in the world?  

Republic Book 2

Book 2 immediately follows up on the unsatisfactory conclusion of Book 1.  In the first section of it (up to 367e8) Glaucon reprises the arguments of Thrasymachus in a more intelligent, less belligerent fashion.  Glaucon does not actually agree with Thrasymachus. He simply means to provoke Socrates into really engaging deeply with the question of what justice is in itself, aside from the effects of appearing just  to others.  In other words, he asks Socrates to put aside the rhetorical games of Book 1 and ask the question amongst friends.   And at first, it seems that this strategy of theirs will work.  Socrates proposes a method of investigating justice in itself by magnifying it, so to speak, from the scale of the individual soul to that of a city.  But just as his explanation of what makes for a just city gets going, he gets drawn into a tangent on the organization of a luxurious city (372d3).  Strangely, the rest of the chapter is occupied with the details of this tangent.  In fact, this is where Socrates starts to delve into some of the more nasty fascistic aspects of the republic that I remember from freshman year.  For example, he starts explaining how we have to censor most poetry so that it does corrupt the youth who are bred to be future rulers (377d9).  It's interesting that this stuff is inserted inside a parenthesis in the argument that still remains open at the end of Book 2.  We'll have to keep a lookout for the ).

Glaucon's argument for why injustice is better and people are just only unwillingly is much better structured than Thrasymachus'.  

So, if you agree, I'll renew the argument of Thrasymachus. First, I'll state what kind of thing people consider justice to be and what its origins are. Second, I'll argue that all who practice it do so unwillingly, as something necessary, not as something good. Third, I'll argue that they have good reason to act as they do, for the life of an unjust person is, they say, much better than that of a just one. (358b8)

Justice, according to Glaucon's first argument, is a necessary evil.  Everyone would naturally like to be unjust, to do whatever they want (he does not consider the possibility of a-justice), but they're afraid of their neighbor coming to bonk them on the head over it.  Because people are not powerful enough to consistently follow their natural inclination to injustice without getting punished, they turn to justice as an agreement to mutually give up their injustice.  Justice, in short, is a compromise brought into being with the Hobbesian social contract, a way to alleviate our fear of how nasty, brutish, and short life might be.  

It is intermediate between the best and the worst. The best is to do injustice without paying the penalty; the worst is to suffer it without being able to take revenge. Justice is a mean between these two extremes. People value it not as a good but because they are too weak to do injustice with impunity. (359a4)

With this definition in hand, Glaucon illustrates his second thesis with a thought experiment about a ring of invisibility (359e9).  He claims that possessing such a ring -- which would allow us to steal with impunity, sleep with other men's wives (?), and just generally outlive the hell out of everybody -- would make us all unjust in seconds.  Naturally, this illustrates that we only value justice out of fear, but we consider injustice a good and beneficial thing in an of itself.

Finally, he demonstrates that this conception of justice means that the unjust man is happier than the just, provided he gives the appearance of being just.  We can easily see this if we evaluate injustice itself, divorced from the question of whether a person has a reputation for justice.  Here, he almost reverses the ring of invisibility thought experiment.  The purely unjust person would nevertheless also be the one who appears the most just, since he is a master of cunning deception.  By contrast, the truly just person would value only justice in itself, and by refusing to manage his public person would end up with a great reputation for injustice (361b9).  It's as if the truly just person had made his inner justice invisible.  Since Glaucon has defined justice so as to include the appearance of injustice, and vice versa, it's obvious which of these two men is going to end up happier.  

As Glaucon finishes, his brother Adeimantus speaks up to double down on this powerful case against justice.  Adeimantus points out that even though everyone always piously talks about how great justice is, all of their praise is inevitably for the consequences of justice, its effect on one's reputation and all the good things that follow, and not praise of justice itself.   In fact, if we are to judge from most of the Greek myths, even the gods reward injustice and deceit.  All the stories we grow up with, then, show us how the unjust man gets ahead then avoids punishment by spreading his ill gotten gains around.  Even the gods can be appeased in this manner with a few extra sacrifices.   

Between the two, Glaucon and Adeimantus have thrown down quite a challenge to Socrates.  He is being asked to defend justice in itself, as if all its consequences were invisible, when all the weight of public opinion agrees that justice is only valuable in so far as it appears to other.   

Don't, then, give us only a theoretical argument that justice is stronger than injustice, but show what effect each has because of itself on the person who has it—the one for good and the other for bad—whether it remains hidden from gods and human beings or not. (367e1)

 

Socrates response begins in a promising way.  First, he offers a methodological change of venue.  Instead of investigating the justice of an individual soul, he suggests that we explore the analogous justice of a whole city.  This, he claims, will be like a large print version of the same concept, more easily read by the myopic (368e8).  Then he cuts straight to the heart of the problem with any state-of-nature or social contract theory about justice.  These all presume that humans are individually self-sufficient little atoms innately engaged in some war of all-against-all.  Of course, if this were true, we'd still be chimpanzees (with due apology to chimps, some of my best friends are chimps, and this description does even them a disservice).  There have never been any individual humans in a state of nature.  The story is the projection of more modern ideas onto the history of our species.  Individual humans would be so powerless as to be already dead.  Humans survive and succeed through sociability, through community.  Far from some compromise that results from our powerlessness, this community is the very source of our power.  And not simply our power to defend ourselves against injustice, but our positive power to together create anything worth defending to begin with.  In short, a just community is an enabler before it is a limitation.  

I think a city comes to be because none of us is self-sufficient, but we all need many things. Do you think that a city is founded on any other principle?
No.
And because people need many things, and because one person calls on a second out of one need and on a third out of a different need, many people gather in a single place to live together as partners and helpers.
And such a settlement is called a city. Isn't that so? 

It is.
And if they share things with one another, giving and taking, they do so because each believes that this is better for himself? (369b6)

Lest you think Socrates is talking about some form of Marxism here, he spends the next few pages describing a market economy right out of a Milton Friedman textbook.  Farmers, carpenters, weavers, merchants, and retailers all see the mutual benefit afforded by a specialization and the division of labor coordinated by markets (371b3).  While Graeber may have taught us that this story too is a myth (especially insofar as it makes money and not debt central) at least this version emphasizes a core truth about humans -- we are nothing without each other.  

So Socrates describes his little anarco-capitalist paradise.  But just as he prepares to investigate what this story can teach us about justice, a curious thing happens.  Glaucon jokes that Socrates' city is so spartan its food would be fit only for pigs (372d3).  Shouldn't we describe a more realistic city, like, say, Athens?  This is the point where the parenthesis I mentioned at the outset opens up.  

It isn't merely the origin of a city that we're considering, it seems, but the origin of a luxurious city. And that may not be a bad idea, for by examining it, we might very well see how justice and injustice grow up in cities. Yet the true city, in my opinion, is the one we've described, the healthy one, as it were. But let's study a city with a fever, if that's what you want. (372e2)

So everything that follows in this chapter is Socrates describing a "luxurious" city,  not the "true" and "healthy" city.  Yet he goes on describing this "fevered" city for another 10 pages and shows no signs of stopping the description at the end of the chapter.  I'm really dying to know what happens when we return from this tangent.  

The tangent itself turns out to be a bit boring.  A luxurious city will need all kinds of other fancy schmancy goods beyond what Socrates already provided for.  As a result, it will need more people, and then more land, and then, most significantly, people to seize the land from other groups and defend the land from those groups.  In other words, it seems like this luxurious city will function just like one of Glaucon's unjust, but oh so pious, marauders.  Socrates does not make this analogy explicit, but it's pretty obvious now that I think about it, and adds a little more drama to how this parenthetical discussion will conclude.  Instead, Socrates concerns himself with how the luxurious city will find specialized people to guard it -- the guardians (375e5).  This seems like a bit of a euphemistic description of these folks, since they are explicitly introduced in the context of plundering foreign lands.  Nevertheless, Socrates is going to spend the rest of the chapter describing what these people should be like, and how they should be educated.

Basically, he describes the guardians as philosophical guard dogs (375d8-376c1). They are supposed to rabidly attack anyone foreign, anyone they don't know and who doesn't belong to the city, but be completely docile and under the control of the residents. 

Surely this is a refined quality in its nature and one that is truly philosophical.
In what way philosophical?
Because it judges anything it sees to be either a friend or an enemy, on no other basis than that it knows the one and doesn't know the other. And how could it be anything besides a lover of learning, if it defines what is its own and what is alien to it in terms of knowledge and ignorance? (376b)

The description of the guardians is such a caricature that I almost suspect Plato is pulling our leg here.  But then Socrates proceeds to describe their education in some detail.  To fulfill their role, they must only be brought up with a carefully curated selection of myths and other stories.  This censorship should instill in them a deep belief that gods and heroes never do any wrong (380c4) that all the citizens of the republic love one another (378c4) and that the gods never try to deceive us or practice the kind of shape changing sorcery the usual myths depict (383a2).  In other words, they have to somehow learn all the opposite stories to the ones Adeimantus mentioned, those which taught us that justice was for losers.  

One other thing bears noting in this section.  In the course of proving that the gods would never deceive us, Socrates introduces the idea of a "true falsehood" (382a4).  While I found his explanation of the term slightly vague, it seems to define Ignorance in the soul as the Form of falsehood.  For example, when you genuinely base your whole worldview on some mistaken premise you are embracing a true falsehood.  Other falsehoods are mere likenesses of this Form.  The logic seems to be that they imply knowing that what you say is false, whereas a true falsehood is just completely ignorant of the truth.  Socrates goes on to observe that there are good reasons to lie in some situations, but none of those situations would apply to the gods.  Perhaps this passage is the forerunner of the famous Noble Lie we'll see later?

Republic Book 1

The Republic starts off in pretty classic Socratic fashion.  A short preamble conversation with old man Cephalus on the benefits of again and wealth soon transitions into the main question: "what is justice?"  In the remainder of the chapter various interlocutor's offer definitions of justice that Socrates investigates with his customary questions.  Some of Socrates' arguments feel unusually sophistical, or rhetorical as we might say now, compared to his normal line of questioning.  So perhaps it's not surprising that Book 1 ends in aporetic fashion, with Socrates announcing his disappointment with the fact that he got sidetracked.  Distracted by the verbal combat, he never got to the main question of what justice is, and instead simply investigated whether we should expect it to be beneficial or not.  

The conversation begins promisingly enough.  The first thesis belongs to Cephalus' son Polemarchus, who argues that justice is, "to give each what is owed him."(331e2)  He has in mind the classic Greek idea that you owe your friends good and your enemies harm.  As you can expect, this soon leads to some odd conclusions about justice.  It seems that this kind of justice would be most useful in a war or some other type of conflict situation (332e4).  In peacetime, it would boil down to honesty in dealing with your business partners (33b7).  But this type of honesty really just knows how to safeguard money and give it back, since using money to make a profit breeding horses or building boats requires, not the skill of justice, but knowledge of horse breeding and boat building.  In short, this type of justice seems pretty useless for daily life (334e1).  

The conception of justice as a particular skill or craft, a techne, runs throughout the first book.  Making justice a type of craft immediately implies that it involves some kind of knowledge. Socrates will make use of this underlying idea a number of times in his arguments.  It appears for the first time when he forces Polemarchus to reckon with what happens when people misjudge who is their true friend or enemy (334c5) -- we wouldn't consider it just to harm someone who is truly our friend even if they don't appear that way at the moment.  Whenever there is knowledge in Plato, there follows a distinction between appearance and reality, between opinion and truth.  Which means that Polemarchus is forced to restate his thesis about justice to include both an apparent or relative relationship (friend versus enemy) as well as a true or absolute one (good versus bad).

So you want us to add something to what we said before about justice, when we said that it is just to treat friends well and enemies badly. You want us to add to this that it is just to treat well a friend who is good and to harm an enemy who is bad? (335a6)

Once we have opened an absolute distinction between good and bad, it's a simple step to ask what makes someone good or bad, that is, that in virtue of which they judged good or bad.  And with this question we complete the Platonic equation of all the good nouns: Justice = Virtue = Knowledge = Wisdom = Benefit = Goodness.  Justice is human virtue (335c3), arete.

Arete is broader than our notion of virtue, which tends to be applied only to human beings, and restricted to good sexual behavior or helpfulness on their part to others. Arete could equally be translated "excellence" or "goodness." Thus if something is a knife (say) its arete or "virtue" as a knife is that state or property of it that makes it a good knife—having a sharp blade, and so on. So with the virtue of a man: this might include being intelligent, well-born, or courageous, as well as being just and sexually well-behaved. (tranlator's note pg. 980)

So really almost by definition, justice is what makes people good.  But in that case, Polemarchus' definition falls apart completely.  Because you can't make someone good or even just better, by doing them harm (335d1).  If just people are good, they possess a peculiar virtue for producing goodness.  In which case they're not going to go around producing badness by harming people, even if those people are an enemy and bad (335e1).  

Judging from the conclusion of the chapter (and the much more confrontational dialog that follows with Thrasymachus) I think we're supposed to be vaguely aware that Socrates is pulling a fast one on us here.  In pulling apart the usual Greek formulation of justice as 'just deserts' he seems to have assumed the conclusion as the starting point -- justice is about some universal good, in fact, it's the very quality that makes us good.  But this subtly shifts the question from what justice is, in itself, to what benefits it has, for us and others.

Thrasymachus, however, was not fooled.  He comes storming into the dialog with the post-Nietzschean contention that justice is really just the name we give to whatever is to the advantage of the stronger (338c1).  We've seen this same type of argument in the mouth of Callicles in Gorgias -- basically, might makes right.  Here, Socrates' refutation of Thrasymachus takes a different form than in Gorgias, but it still revolves around the already introduced idea that justice is some sort of craft that involves the knowledge of what is truly good for us.  At first it seems that Thrasymachus will be caught out by the same problem that plagued Callicles' and Polemarchus' definition of justice -- what if the stronger make a mistake about what is truly good for them?  If the ruler accidentally and unknowingly does something that is not to his advantage, we don't want to call that justice, do we?  But Thrasymachus refuses to be led down this path, and defines the stronger, the ruler, as knowing what is to his advantage.

When someone makes an error in the treatment of patients, do you call him a doctor in regard to that very error? Or when someone makes an error in accounting, do you call him an accountant in regard to that very error in calculation? I think that we express ourselves in words that, taken literally, do say that a doctor is in error, or an accountant, or a grammarian. But each of these, insofar as he is what we call him, never errs, so that, according to the precise account (and you are a stickler for precise accounts), no craftsman ever errs. It's when his knowledge fails him that he makes an error, and in regard to that error he is no craftsman. No craftsman, expert, or ruler makes an error at the moment when he is ruling, even though everyone will say that a physician or a ruler makes errors. It's in this loose way that you must also take the answer I gave earlier. But the most precise answer is this. A ruler, insofar as he is a ruler, never makes errors and unerringly decrees what is best for himself, and this his subject must do. Thus, as I said from the first, it is just to do what is to the advantage of the stronger. (340d)

In a way, Thrasymachus is pulling his own fast one here.  Everyone agrees that justice is something good, something which produces a benefit.  Socrates goes in circles by defining justice as what makes us good, without first defining goodness.  Thrasymachus, meanwhile, defines goodness equally vacuously, as just whatever the ruler does, with the presumption that this will always be to their benefit if they truly know the craft of ruling.  Neither definition really gets at the core of the matter, which is the same Platonic question as always -- how do we know what's good for us?

Perhaps Socrates response to Thrasymachus feels like a bit of sophistry because this main question is not at stake; he's just trying to win the argument now and not investigate the deeper issue yet.  The response falls into two parts.  

In the first, Socrates makes an analogy between the craft of ruling and other crafts like shepherding or medicine.  In themselves, these crafts aim to benefit only the thing that is the object of the craft.  Shepherding benefits sheep.  Doctoring benefits the body healed, etc ... In other words, 

... no craft or rule provides for its own advantage, but, as we've been saying for some time, it provides and orders for its subject and aims at its advantage, that of the weaker, not of the stronger. (436e3)

This line of argument that every craft is, in itself, completely generous and altruistic, seems faintly ridiculous.  Indeed, to account for why we need to pay doctors and shepherds, Socrates is immediately forced to introduce the idea of a craft called 'wage-earning'.  The resulting picture is of a doctor who looks out for his own benefit by employing the craft of wage earning, which in turn focuses solely on maximizing his wages by employing the craft of doctoring, which, in itself, has nothing to do with either wages or the benefit of the doctor, but focuses entirely on healing patients.  These dubious artificial distinctions do allow Socrates to make a real point, however, about the analogous craft of ruling.  Rulers don't rule for their own benefit.  And since it's considered shameful to rule just for the wages or the honor, rulers can only be induced to rule because it allows them to avoid a peculiar type of punishment -- being ruled by some incompetent moron.  

... if they're to be willing to rule, some compulsion or punishment must be brought to bear on them—perhaps that's why it is thought shameful to seek to rule before one is compelled to. Now, the greatest punishment, if one isn't willing to rule, is to be ruled by someone worse than oneself. And I think that it's fear of this that makes decent people rule when they do. They approach ruling not as something good or something to be enjoyed, but as something necessary, since it can't be entrusted to anyone better than—or even as good as—themselves. In a city of good men, if it came into being, the citizens would fight in order not to rule, just as they do now in order to rule.(347c1)

I suspect we'll see this idea of the reluctant ruler again.  If the just ruler has to spend all his time looking after his subject like a shepherd looking after his sheep, we're going to need some explanation of how this benefits him.

The second part of Socrates response to Thrasymachus feels even more like sleight of hand designed only to win the argument.  He preys on Thrasymachus' image of the just person as an altruistic pushover to establish that the just don't compete amongst themselves, but want to be rewarded for their justice by finishing ahead of the unjust.  For the unjust, by contrast, it's every man for himself.  The same type of structure would apply to the knowledgeable and ignorant as well.  Two knowledgeable=clever=good scientists don't compete with one another to find a 'better' truth, instead they aim at agreement and equality in the face of this truth.  Meanwhile, ignorant=bad people are always trying to look better than both the knowledge folks, as well as the other ignorant folks.  You can see where this is going.  Socrates completes the syllogism and corners Thrasymachus into admitting that since they compete against unlike rather than like, the just must be knowledgeable and good, whereas the ignorant, who compete against both like and unlike, must be bad and unjust.  It's a bit of a cheap shot, argumentation wise, whose only real contribution seems to be to reinforce the equation of true=clever=just=good that we've already seen.

In the final pages of the chapter, Socrates changes gears a little and adds one more term  to the equation -- harmony (though he doesn't explicitly use this word yet).  Nietzsche's disciple Thrasymachus believes that injustice is powerful, particularly when it is so thorough-going that it leads one to try and tyrannize a whole city.  Socrates wants to find a way to undermine the equation of injustice with power.  So he argues that even a terribly unjust band of marauders is only made powerful by the internal cohesion of their common purpose, which must be based on some sort of internal justice amongst the members, like say, a rule for the common division of spoils.  If the unjust were completely unjust in every way, they wouldn't ever be powerful enough to cooperate, so they would remain relatively powerless.

We have shown that just people are cleverer and more capable of doing things, while unjust ones aren't even able to act together, for when we speak of a powerful achievement by unjust men acting together, what we say isn't altogether true. They would never have been able to keep their hands off each other if they were completely unjust. But clearly there must have been some sort of justice in them that at least prevented them from doing injustice among themselves at the same time as they were doing it to others. And it was this that enabled them to achieve what they did. (352b8) 

In Plato, it almost goes without saying that harmony is a virtue to be added to our equation.  Just in case though, Socrates makes it explicit that harmoniously ruling over and coordinating things is precisely the function of the soul (353d3).  Already we can almost hear the resonance of Soul and Form we found in Phaedo.

Parmenides

Parmenides is frankly baffling.  I'm apparently not the only one who feels this way either.  The dialog is such a complete departure from everything else we've read so far that it makes you suspect the editors pulled a fast one at some point in the past 2,500 years.  It's shockingly different not only in terms of its philosophical content, but in terms of its style of presentation and its literary language.  For an author who is normally extraordinarily clear, it was just plain weird to find the final three quarters of the dialog filled with word salad.  At points I found myself thinking it all just sounded like gobbledygook.  While I'm somewhat tempted to seriously take up the challenge of sorting it all out, I doubt I'll have the stomach to go into the level of detail of that SEP article (itself inconclusive).  So we may leave this discussion at a fairly high level.  The only thing that is immediately clear is that this is the 'latest' dialog we've read, and certainly signals some sort of transition beyond from the classical theory of Forms we saw in Phaedo, Phaedrus, and the Symposium.  The break is so stark that I've changed my mind about saving the Republic for last.  Since it is clearly a middle period dialog, I plan to read it next, followed by the final remaining dialog that folks classify as 'middle' -- Theaetetus -- to see whether there isn't perhaps some lead up to this fracture.

Broadly speaking, Parmenides consists of three parts:  

1)The frame story here is quite short but ridiculously multilevel.  We, the reader, are listening to Cephalus tell the story of the time he asked Antiphon to repeat the conversation his buddy Pythodorus once heard between Zeno, Parmenides, and a very young Socrates.  Why it goes from God to Jerry to you to the cleaners is anybody's guess, right Kent?  The conversation Cephalus tells us that Antiphon said Pythodorus told him about then breaks down into two parts, with the second much longer than the first.  

2) Initially, the discussion between Socrates, Parmenides, and Parmenides' star student Zeno is a little abstract and technical, but relatively straightforward.  Socrates makes some comments on Zeno's philosophy based on his (then nascent) theory of the Forms.  In response, Parmenides raises several objections to the theory of Forms that Socrates seems unable to adequately answer.  However, instead of writing off the theory as refuted, Parmenides outlines the steps Socrates needs to take to shore it up.  Basically, he needs to ask not only what conclusions we come to if we think the Forms exist, but also examine what conclusions we would come to if we thought they didn't exist.

... if you want to be trained more thoroughly, you must not only hypothesize, if each thing is, and examine the consequences of that hypothesis; you must also hypothesize, if that same thing is not."
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"If you like," said Parmenides, "take as an example this hypothesis that Zeno entertained: if many are,what must the consequences be both for the many themselves in relation to themselves and in relation to the one, and for the one in relation to itself and in relation to the many? And, in turn, on the hypothesis, if many are not, you must again examine what the consequences will be both for the one and for the many in relation to themselves and in relation to each other. (136a)

3) In the final part of the dialog, its bulk, Parmenides gives an example of how this method would apply to a concept like 'the one' -- precisely the concept he was famous for expounding.  This longest section is the one I called baffling gobbledygook and word salad.  It reads a bit like the sophism we saw in Euthydemus, though I don't think Parmenides is meant to be a satirical character.  Still, he appears to systematically deduce everything as well as its opposite about the one, and leaves us with this thoroughly useless little gem.

"Let us then say this – and also that, as it seems, whether one is or is not, it and the others both are and are not, and both appear and do not appear all things in all ways, both in relation to themselves and in relation to each other." (166c)

I don't know that I'm going to figure out the final part, but I'd like to go through the second in detail, because it contains Plato's own sustained critique of the doctrine of Forms.

I think the first thing to pay attention to is the philosophical context of the dialog between Zeno and Socrates.  Zeno, as we know, argued that motion and change were impossible.  Socrates begins by observing that this is really just a restatement of his master Parmenides' thesis that only a timeless, eternal, and unchanging One truly is.  Zeno claims that the many are not, while Paremendies contends that the one is -- these are two sides of the same coin (128b).  So from the beginning, the dialog concerns the eternal question of monism versus pluralism.  While this may be sorta obvious, I think it's worth noting for two reasons.  First, Parmenides' deductions in the strange third part of the dialog explicitly have to do with whether the one is or is not and whether the many are or are not.  So, while this is portrayed as just one example of the deductive method Parmenides suggests, it seems unlikely that it is a mere pedagogic exercise.  The example is central to Eleatic philosophy.  Second, the theory of the Forms sits rather uneasily between these two poles. On the one hand, the unity and singularity and unchangeable timelessness of a Form of like Beauty clearly aligns it with the side of the One.  On the other hand, there's more than one Form, and many things participate in each Form.  Setting aside (for now) the question of whether we interpret the theory of Forms as attributing a Form to every and any distinction we can make, we know for sure that there are at least forms of Beauty, Courage, Largeness, Smallness, Wisdom, Knowledge, etc ... The list of Forms actually seems pretty open-ended.  And if this list is infinite or at least indefinite, then the collection of Forms might itself be a sort of Form -- the Many.  In addition, the list of beautiful things that partake in Beauty also seems indefinitely long.  So in both these ways then, the Forms, while Ones, seem to have some inherent relation to the many.  In short, the battle between monism and pluralism seems to run throughout the dialog, hidden just barely under the surface. 

The conversation between Zeno and Socrates begins with a separate question that seems related to pluralism and monism -- purity versus mixture.  In his book, Zeno proved that the many are not by arguing that if there were many things they would have to be both like and unlike at the same time (127e).  The argument is not well explained here, but seems to revolve around the fact that many different things would naturally be unlike one another, but would all still be like another in being things that are.  Zeno considers this proof that the many must not be, because like things cannot be unlike, nor unlike things like one another.  Socrates, however, begins by arguing that this isn't surprising at all and proves nothing, because things are mixtures.  They are like in some respects and unlike in others because they partake of various Forms, in this case the Form of Likeness and Unlikeness.  The same argument would apply no matter what Forms we are talking about though.  Since things have a mixture of properties inherited from Forms, they can be perfectly contradictory amongst themselves.  Only the Forms themselves need to be pure entities in themselves.  Zeno would only be making headway if he proved that the Many was both like and unlike the One.

"If someone showed that the likes themselves come to be unlike or the b unlikes like – that, I think, would be a marvel; but if he shows that things that partake of both of these have both properties, there seems to me nothing strange about that, Zeno – not even if someone shows that all things are one by partaking of oneness, and that these same things are many by partaking also of multitude. But if he should demonstrate this thing itself, what one is, to be many, or, conversely, the many to be one – at this I'll be astonished. (129b)

Interestingly, it's Parmenides, not Zeno, who responds to Socrates' criticism.  He will provide a sustained critique of the theory of Forms Socrates' professes.  But first, there's a kind of curious preface (130b-e) in which Socrates is forced to clarify what things have Forms.  That the Just, the Beautiful, and the Good have Forms goes without saying.  Human Beings, Fire, and Water, however, seem to Socrates questionable cases.  Mundane things like Hair, Mud, and Dirt probably don't have Forms, though Socrates equivocates a little even here.

Surely it's too outlandish to think there is a form for them. Not that the thought that the same thing might hold in all cases hasn't troubled me from time to time. Then, when I get bogged down in that, I hurry away, afraid that I may fall into some pit of nonsense and come to harm; but when I arrive back in the vicinity of the things we agreed a moment ago have forms, I linger there and occupy myself with them. (130d)

It seems that while all things are mixtures that partake of multiple different Forms which are pure in themselves, some things themselves are too mixed, too impure, ever to have a pure Form associated with them.  It's clearly an incoherent and arbitrary line for Socrates to draw, and Parmenides wastes no time in pointing out that he's making a rookie mistake in following common sense opinions about what should and what shouldn't get a Form.

"That's because you are still young, Socrates," said Parmenides, "and philosophy has not yet gripped you as, in my opinion, it will in the future, once you begin to consider none of the cases beneath your notice. Now, though, you still care about what people think, because of your youth. (130e)

So right off the bat we face the problem of how many Forms there are.  We might imagine a "finite theory of Forms", where some defined set of Forms is able to mix together in various proportions to account for the appearance of all things.  But this doesn't seem to be what Socrates has in mind (indeed, it sounds a lot more like Aristotle).  Some things that are "totally undignified and worthless" (130c6) would fall completely outside of this network as mere appearances.  I think this is another case where we're seeing the underlying moral ground of the theory of Forms poke through a bit.  As we've seen before, the Forms are not simply metaphysical speculations, but are ultimately meant to have an ethical basis.  If every mundane thing has a Form, how are they going to help us figure out how to live the good life?  The Forms need to be somehow selective, things to aspire to.  Without an obvious finite number of Forms though the problem of just how many there are becomes particularly pressing.  So pressing, in fact, that I'm now wondering whether what we're seeing in this dialog is actually the application of the pluralism-monism context we discussed to the Forms themselves.  Are there many Forms, or really just One?  Would this be the Good, or the Form of Forms?  But wouldn't the Form of Forms, the collection of Forms, individually one, be the Many?  It's not clear, but I think perhaps we're skipping up a level just as Socrates did in his response to Zeno.  The one and the many here may not refer to things, but to Forms.

After this elusive preamble, Parmenides goes on to pose a series of problems for the theory of Forms.  I don't think it's coincidental that many of these problems involve an infinite proliferation of Forms.  In a sense, these are the same paradoxes Zeno is famous for, though applied to the concept of unity rather than continuity.

The first problem regards the divisibility of Forms.  Is it the whole form of Beauty -- a single unity -- that appears in all of the many beautiful things, or is Beauty itself divided and partitioned into many things?  Socrates argues that the Form itself appears as one and makes an analogy between a Form and the unity of a day, which contains all the things that happen in it without really being divided.  Parmenides doesn't really refute this but quickly changes the analogy and asks whether a Form isn't more like a sail draped over a bunch of people.  Sure, one sail covers everyone, but different people are covered by different parts.  Obviously, if we conceive the unity of a Form in this spatial way, it will be manifold and divisible, a many, not a one. 

The second problem Parmenides poses explicitly sets up an infinite regress of Forms.  Socrates claims that all the various large things partake of the single Form of Largeness (what we might call the > function).  But what happens if we add the Large itself to the set of all large things.  Surely, if anything is large then the Large itself is a large thing.  Don't we then need a second Form of Largeness, call it Large2: the sequel, that lies behind the largeness of all the things in this new set?  But now we'll have to keep adding Forms of Largeness indefinitely.  Socrates tries to wriggle out of this one by arguing that the Form is not really a thing but just a thought, something that only occurs in minds.  There are a lot of ways to attack this weak attempt at escape.  Parmenides seems to have a representational view of thought, so he simply asks what the thought is of.  What is the object of a thought of a Form?  The question answers itself and leads us straight back to the multiplication of Forms -- the thought of what large things and the Large have in common will be of the Form Large2.  Alternatively, if we think that Forms are thoughts, and that things (outside of humans) partake in the Forms, we seem to be committing ourselves to a sort of panpsychism, which is also not what Socrates has in mind (132d)

Parmenides' third problem again leads us to an infinite regress of Forms, this time as a result of the symmetry of the 'likeness' or similarity relation that Socrates has in mind when he says that things 'partake' in a Form.  If a thing is like a Form, how can the Form not also be like the thing?  But if two things are like one another, isn't that because they participate in the same Form?  So again, if Form1 is like things X, Y, and Z, then things X, Y, Z, and Form1 must all partake in the likeness of Form2.  And so on.  We can sum up these first three problems by observing that no matter how we conceive of the relationship between Forms and things -- whether Forms are things, thoughts, or "patterns set in nature" (132d) -- the unity we would like to have in our Forms keeps fracturing into a multitude.  The pluralism of the world of things keeps infecting the monism we desire for the world of Forms.

Even though he's already given three reasons why the Forms might not exist at all in the way we want, Parmenides thinks that the greatest difficulty with the theory lies not in its ontology, but in its epistemology.  Even if the Forms exist, how can we know about them?  These entities are completely in themselves -- they are alone, self-caused, and not contained in anything else.  In particular, they are not in us or any other thing.  Even if we think that things are 'like' the Forms, this likeness comes from the internal relationships amongst things and their parts somehow duplicating the pattern of the Form.  In short, it seems that Forms and things could never really interact. 

"Very good," said Parmenides. "And so all the characters that are what they are in relation to each other have their being in relation to themselves but not in relation to things that belong to us. And whether one posits the latter as likenesses or in some other way, it is by partaking of them that we come to be called by their various names. These things that belong to us, although they have the same names as the forms, are in their turn what they are in relation to themselves but not in relation to the forms; and all the things named in this way are of themselves but not of the forms."
"What do you mean?" Socrates asked.
"Take an example," said Parmenides. "If one of us is somebody's master or somebody's slave, he is surely not a slave of master itself – of what a master is – nor is the master a master of slave itself – of what a slave is. On the contrary, being a human being, he is a master or slave of a human being. Mastery itself, on the other hand, is what it is of slavery itself; and, in the same way, slavery itself is slavery of mastery itself. Things in us do not have their power in relation to forms, nor do they have theirs in relation to us; but, I repeat, forms are what they are of themselves and in relation to themselves, and things that belong to us are, in the same way, what they are in relation to themselves. You do understand what I mean?" (133d)

[I take the plural here to refer to several Forms each in itself, rather than an indication that the Forms interact with one another.  I'll punt on whether it functions the same way for the being of things.]

As if this ontological gulf weren't reason enough to conclude that we can never interact with the Forms, Parmenides drives home the point by explicitly pointing out we will never possess the Form of Knowledge.  Knowledge itself would be of Truth itself, that is, it would be of the Forms themselves.  But our knowledge is always a knowledge of some particular thing.  Human knowledge is knowledge of human things, just as human masters are masters of humans and not masters of Slave itself.  So without the Form of knowledge being in us, we can't have knowledge of the Forms.  If the Forms are truly in and of themselves, then both things and our knowledge inevitably inhabit a parallel universe to theirs.

"Because we have agreed, Socrates," Parmenides said, "that those forms do not have their power in relation to things in our world, and things in our world do not have theirs in relation to forms, but that things in each group have their power in relation to themselves." (134d)

 

Parmenides goes on to dramatize the point by arguing that if the gods possess this Knowledge itself, they have only made themselves masters of the realm of Forms, and not of the human realm, which they can't know anything about!  The constant Greek refrain that the ways of the gods are unknowable is made to cut both ways here.  

"Well then, if this most precise mastery and this most precise knowledge belong to the divine, the gods' mastery could never master us, nor could their knowledge know us or anything that belongs to us. No, just as we do not govern them by our governance and know nothing of the divine by our knowledge, so they in their turn are, for the same reason, neither our masters nor, being gods, do they know human affairs." (134e)

By this point you'd think that Parmenides had sufficiently dismantled the theory of Forms that he was ready to offer something in its stead.  Unfortunately, no.  In fact, it's right at this juncture that he surprisingly concedes that, despite all his arguments, that the Forms must exist, because otherwise we would "destroy the power of the dialectic entirely" (135c).  While the translator claims that it's not clear whether he means we would destroy our ability to use words in a normal conversation ("dialectic"), or whether he means we would destroy our philosophical method ("dialectic"), I think it's obvious from the context that he means both.  As we saw in Cratylus, Plato sees these two as intimately linked because they both gather together and split apart, trying to carve the world at its joints.  So where do we go from here?  The theory of Forms is in ruin, but we still need it.

This is precisely where Parmenides' bizarre deductions begin.  In other words, yeah, I've only covered 20% of the dialog so far.  Parmenides describes his training method as a way for Socrates to rescue the theory of Forms by elaborating it more carefully and thoroughly (135d).  The core of the idea seems to be that Socrates must examine not only what the world looks like if the Forms exist, but must consider what it would look like if the Forms did not exist as well.  But the set up is so odd that it deserves quoting in full.

"What manner of training is that, Parmenides?" he asked.
"The manner is just what you heard from Zeno," he said. "Except I was also impressed by something you had to say to him: you didn't allow him to remain among visible things and observe their wandering between opposites. You asked him to observe it instead among those things that one might above all grasp by means of reason and might think to be forms."
"I did that," he said, "because I think that here, among visible things, it's not at all hard to show that things are both like and unlike and anything else you please."
"And you are quite right," he said. "But you must do the following in addition to that: if you want to be trained more thoroughly, you must not only hypothesize, if each thing is, and examine the consequences of that hypothesis; you must also hypothesize, if that same thing is not."
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"If you like," said Parmenides, "take as an example this hypothesis that Zeno entertained: if many are, what must the consequences be both for the many themselves in relation to themselves and in relation to the one, and for the one in relation to itself and in relation to the many? And, in turn, on the hypothesis, if many are not, you must again examine what the consequences will be both for the one and for the many in relation to themselves and in relation to each other. And again, in turn, if you hypothesize, if likeness is or if it is not, you must examine what the consequences will be on each hypothesis, both for the things hypothesized themselves and for the others, both in relation to themselves and in relation to each other. And the same method applies to unlike, to motion, to rest, to generation and destruction, and to being itself and not-being. And, in a word, concerning whatever you might ever hypothesize as being or as not being or as having any other property, you must examine the consequences for the thing you hypothesize in relation to itself and in relation to each one of the others, whichever you select, and in relation to several of them and to all of them in the same way; and, in turn, you must examine the others, both in relation to themselves and in relation to whatever other thing you select on each occasion, whether what you hypothesize you hypothesize as being or as not being. All this you must do if, after completing your training, you are to achieve a full view of the truth." (135e)

It's hard to know quite what to make of this rigorous sounding method Parmenides advises.  One thing seems certain though; it bears on the Forms themselves, and not merely things.  Socrates criticized Zeno for not rising to this level in his analysis.  Zeno thought his hypothesis that there are many things resulted in absurdity, in things "wandering between opposites", but for Socrates, this was merely evidence that things are a mixture.  Now, it seems, we need to ask whether the Forms are, and whether there are many Forms.  There's some sort of connection going on between the theory of Forms, the question of the one versus the many, and the relationship within and across the layers that this theory seems to imply.  These are the elements of the problems that Parmenides has touched on, and they seem to me the issues inherent in any interpretation of the theory.  There are many Forms each of which is a single entity.  They are in themselves and relate only to themselves (though the plural here has become ambiguous).  Yet they somehow allow many distinct things to participate in them.

The problem is still a little vague here, but I think this is at least as much Plato's fault as my own.  But the real issue comes when we get into Parmenides deductions and find that they don't appear to answer this problem at all.  Since Parmenides was the philosopher of the One, he will use that as his example instead of Zeno's many.   And he seems to sorta follow the 8 part deduction that he just described.

1. If the one IS:
1. Consequence for the one in relation to itself
2. Consequence for the one in relation to the many
3. Consequence for the many in relation to itself
4. Consequence for the many in relationship to the one
2. If the one is NOT:
1. Consequence for the one in relation to itself
2. Consequence for the one in relation to the many
3. Consequence for the many in relation to itself
4. Consequence for the many in relationship to the one

[You might at first think that 1.2 and 1.4, and likewise 2.2 and 2.4 would be redundant, but bear in mind that the relationship in question doesn't have to be symmetrical.  Indeed, we already saw a glimmer of this problem when we asked about the likeness between things and Forms -- encountering some asymmetrical relation would come in handy.]

Unfortunately, after Parmenides goes through all 8 parts of his method, we don't appear to have gotten anywhere.  It's not as if assuming that the one IS produces some obvious contradiction, but assuming that it is NOT results in consistency.  All 8 deductions in fact result in things we would usually consider contradictions, and in addition they appear to mutually contradict one another. So by the end, we don't know whether to conclude that the one is or is not, or that instead the many is or is not, and we certainly haven't reached any sort of obvious truth about whether the Forms are, nor, by implication, whether they are one or many.  It's just a complete mess that doesn't seem to have advanced anywhere.  I hate to leave it hanging here, but ... I completely lost my train of thought.