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?