William P. Babcock, Nude with Cherub Holding a Mirror, 1860s-1870s, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Plato’s Republic can be found here.
“What do you mean by that, Socrates?” said Glaucon. “The two wages I recognize, but the penalty you speak of and described as a form of wage I don't understand.” “Then,” said I, “you don't understand the wages of the best men for the sake of which the finest spirits hold office and rule when they consent to do so. Don't you know that to be covetous of honor and covetous of money is said to be and is a reproach?” “I do,” he said. “Well, then,” said I, “that is why the good are not willing to rule either for the sake of money or of honor. They do not wish to collect pay openly for their service of rule and be styled hirelings nor to take it by stealth from their office and be called thieves, nor yet for the sake of honor, for they are not covetous of honor. So there must be imposed some compulsion and penalty to constrain them to rule if they are to consent to hold office. That is perhaps why to seek office oneself and not await compulsion is thought disgraceful. But the chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule. It is from fear of this, as it appears to me, that the better sort hold office when they do, and then they go to it not in the expectation of enjoyment nor as to a good thing, but as to a necessary evil and because they are unable to turn it over to better men than themselves or to their like. For we may venture to say that, if there should be a city of good men only, immunity from office-holding would be as eagerly contended for as office is now, and there it would be made plain that in very truth the true ruler does not naturally seek his own advantage but that of the ruled; so that every man of understanding would rather choose to be benefited by another than to be bothered with benefiting him.
Socrates dismisses the idea that either money or honor can possibly motivate the true practitioner of justice. Both money and honor are equivalences set by the conventions of the city. This does not mean that they are meaningless (far from it) but only limited. The true practitioner, as practitioner, is motivated by the needs appropriate to her patient. So the motivation proper to the practitioner of justice is the motivation to act perfectly according to the criteria internal to the art. Socrates goes on to explain what the particular compulsion to rule is for those who practice the art of justice; we must think of the greatest penalty for the practitioner lying in the malpractice of the art. So even the compulsion to rule is internal to the art of justice. Any other motivation drags us out into the indeterminacy of advantage which ended the previous post. We will see, soon enough, that the logic of justice is the logic of life.
“Did you hear,” said I, “all the goods that Thrasymachus just now enumerated for the life of the unjust man?” “I heard,” he said, “but I am not convinced.” “Do you wish us then to try to persuade him, supposing we can find a way, that what he says is not true?” “Of course I wish it,” he said. “If then we oppose him in a set speech enumerating in turn the advantages of being just and he replies and we rejoin, we shall have to count up and measure the goods listed in the respective speeches and we shall forthwith be in need of judges to decide between us. But if, as in the preceding discussion, we come to terms with one another as to what we admit in the inquiry, we shall be ourselves both judges and pleaders.” “Quite so,” he said. “Which method do you like best?” said I. “This one,” he said.
One way of proceeding with the argument as has been articulated thus far is to understand it in terms of equivalence. This is the method that Socrates addresses first above. Taking this approach, we would attempt to understand whether the life of the unjust man or the just man has greater advantages according to some external criteria of advantage. This is Thrasymachus’ approach. Socrates suggests that we instead proceed as he has attempted to thus far and take our criteria to be internal to the logic of justice, the concept considered. This is another element of his attempt to match Thrasymachus’ reflexive account with another, more encompassing account that incorporates that reflexivity. We cannot understand justice according to some equivalence set by it standards set by convention or other contingency, but only according to its own development.
We are then treated to a summarization of Thrasymachus’ argument thus far. Injustice is the art of the particular advantage. Justice is the failure to practice this art. The practitioner of this art is the tyrant. The fruits of this art are the fruits of particular advantage.
“No difference,” said I, “but here is something I want you to tell me in addition to what you have said. Do you think the just man would want to overreach or exceed another just man?” “By no means,” he said; “otherwise he would not be the delightful simpleton that he is.” “And would he exceed or overreach or go beyond the just action?” “Not that either,” he replied. “But how would he treat the unjust man—would he deem it proper and just to outdo, overreach, or go beyond him or would he not?” “He would,” he said, “but he wouldn't be able to.” “That is not my question,” I said, “but whether it is not the fact that the just man does not claim and wish to outdo the just man but only the unjust?” “That is the case,” he replied. “How about the unjust then? Does he claim to overreach and outdo the just man and the just action?” “Of course,” he said, “since he claims to overreach and get the better of everything.” “Then the unjust man will overreach and outdo also both the unjust man and the unjust action, and all his endeavor will be to get the most in everything for himself.” “That is so.”
The practitioner of injustice is a striver. In its only proper form, tyranny, injustice is an attempt to “outdo” the entire city. Its aim is to set the conventions, the equivalences, according to its own particular criteria. But, as we discovered in the last post, it is without criteria. As an “art” it cannot achieve any form of perfection because it does not exist. Understood so, injustice is a shadow of art; each art has internal to its logic a necessity for difference. This difference, the needs of its patient, is the condition for its possible perfection. Because injustice cannot recognize difference as difference, but can only assimilate it to already-established equivalences of particular interest, it cannot establish a criterion which is truly its own. Its indicators of success, the equivalences of money and honor, similarly gain their criteria from sources outside of themselves). Injustice produces no unity and so cannot do what it strives to do: begin, or produce something wholly its own. And so it must always respond. Injustice is “second-order”, not because it is “behind” the apparent justice of the city, but because it is a parasitic response to the living unity of the city and needs proper to it. It is self-contradictory because it depends on what it disavows.
“Let us put it in this way,” I said; “the just man does not seek to take advantage of his like but of his unlike, but the unjust man of both.” “Admirably put,” he said. “But the unjust man is intelligent and good and the just man neither.” “That, too, is right,” he said. “Is it not also true,” I said, “that the unjust man is like the intelligent and good and the just man is not?” “Of course,” he said, “being such he will be like to such and the other not.” “Excellent. Then each is such as that to which he is like.” “What else do you suppose?” he said. “Very well, Thrasymachus, but do you recognize that one man is a musician and another unmusical?” “I do.” “Which is the intelligent and which the unintelligent?” “The musician, I presume, is the intelligent and the unmusical the unintelligent.” “And is he not good in the things in which he is intelligent and bad in the things in which he is unintelligent?” “Yes.” “And the same of the physician?” “The same.” “Do you think then, my friend, that any musician in the tuning of a lyre would want to overreach another musician in the tightening and relaxing of the strings or would claim and think fit to exceed or outdo him?” “I do not.” “But would the the unmusical man?” “Of necessity,” he said.
Socrates’ aim is to show the absurdity of the art without criterion. The physician and the musician respond, as the tyrant does, but each responds to the difference which they recognize and to which they attune themselves. What differentiates this response from the response of the tyrant is that the former retains the difference as determinate whereas the latter mistakes convention for the difference proper to art. The physician recognizes that he can fail in her medicine. The musician can play a piece poorly. Tyranny, without criterion, can gauge success only by the criteria of convention, which in turn depend upon the asymmetry of art. The former in their multitude cultivate, the latter in its solitude digests.
What’s more the criteria to which tyranny responds can only be partial. If the tyrant responds to needs of the city, she is definitionally not acting as a tyrant and there is no room in which she can press her particular advantage. The democrats press for the advantage of the many, the oligarchic for the few, the tyrant for her own. But each can only press this advantage at the cost of the difference to which it responds. It erodes its own basis, whereas the practitioner of art reproduces theirs. This is the perfection of the internal criterion of art; each art, in taking care of a unity, enables its reproduction, its own perfect performance by practitioners. What it is to practice an art is just to produce such a unity which is capable of reproduction. It is this sort of unity which tyranny mimics and to which it must respond. Justice is reproduction, injustice is barren. So what is it that justice reproduces? And how?
“But please me in one thing more and tell me this: do you think that a city, an army, or bandits, or thieves, or any other group that attempted any action in common, could accomplish anything if they wronged one another?” “Certainly not,” said he. “But if they didn't, wouldn't they be more likely to?” “Assuredly.” “For factions, Thrasymachus, are the outcome of injustice, and hatreds and internecine conflicts, but justice brings oneness of mind and love. Is it not so?” “So be it,” he replied, “not to differ from you.” “That is good of you, my friend; but tell me this: if it is the business of injustice to engender hatred wherever it is found, will it not, when it springs up either among freemen or slaves, cause them to hate and be at strife with one another, and make them incapable of effective action in common?” “By all means.” “Suppose, then, it springs up between two, will they not be at outs with and hate each other and be enemies both to one another and to the just?” “They will,” he said. “And then will you tell me that if injustice arises in one it will lose its force and function or will it none the less keep it?” “Have it that it keeps it,” he said. “And is it not apparent that its force is such that wherever it is found in city, family, camp, or in anything else it first renders the thing incapable of cooperation with itself owing to faction and difference, and secondly an enemy to itself and to its opposite in every case, the just? Isn't that so?” “By all means.”
Injustice is the dissolution of a whole into its parts through a favoring of the part, the faction. Socrates tells us that injustice thus erodes its own capacity to promote particular advantage, since the advantage in question comes from a form of cooperation intrinsic to the unity within which it is “practiced”. It is a refunctioning of interdependent parts, and so it is a dissolution of those parts as parts. Thrasymachus told us that what something is should be understood in terms of its function; to change something’s function is thus to change what it is. The city, dissolved to the war of factions, is no longer a city. There is no longer any unity to pick out, but the sea of particular interest. And so the dissolution proper to tyranny has as its end nonsense, nothing. But, again, this should come as no surprise. Without criteria, the tyrant’s “reinterpretation” of the city erases the object interpreted.
In the next post, we will see injustice still needs to be taken out to its final inference. The unity of city will consist in its response to the needs, rightfully understood particular interests, of those who make it up. Injustice will not be complete until the tyrant herself is emptied.