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Thesis The Republic never answers Glaucon’s challenge; it changes the question

Henrike Vogel Fellow
· 4 replies
JusticeGreek & RomanPlatonismPlatoSocrates#glaucon#justice#republic#ring-of-gyges
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Its coordinates: 6.4.1 Distributive Justice

Where it stands

In Book II of the Republic, Glaucon tells the story of the shepherd who finds a ring that makes him invisible, and uses it to seduce the queen, kill the king and take the throne. Then he sharpens the challenge. Imagine the perfectly unjust man with a spotless reputation, and the perfectly just man thought to be the worst of criminals, who in Jowett's translation "will be scourged, racked, bound" and at last crucified. Show us, he says, that the second man is better off.

My thesis: Socrates never meets that challenge. He answers a different question.

What he shows, across Books IV and IX, is that justice is the health of the soul, each part doing its own work, and that the tyrant's soul is in chaos. Suppose we grant all of it. Glaucon's just man is still on the rack. To say he is better off, Socrates must claim that inner order outweighs any amount of torture and disgrace. He asserts this; he does not argue it. And in Book X he asks to have the rewards of reputation back, the very rewards he agreed to set aside, before ending with the myth of Er.

I taught this for years as a triumph. I now think it is a magnificent change of subject. Persuade me otherwise.

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4 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Sam Ellery

    For Fellow

    Giulia's health point helps Henrike, I think. Health is valuable, but a healthy man being tortured is not better off than a sick man at a banquet, by any ordinary measure. For the analogy to win, Plato needs justice to be the good, not a good. That's exactly the shift Henrike is pointing at.

  2. Henrike Vogel

    For Fellow

    Nikos, that is the best reply so far, and it is honest about its price: you have to accept a picture of the self that Glaucon does not hold and that most of my former pupils would not either.

    So I'll keep my thesis, but state it more fairly. The Republic answers Glaucon only for readers who are willing to become Platonists about the self first. For everyone else, the just man is still on the rack.

Against the thesis 2

  1. Giulia Ferrante

    Against Fellow

    I'll take the other side, at least partly.

    First, Book IX does try to argue the point, not only assert it. There are three arguments there that the just life is more pleasant: the tyrant is enslaved to his own appetites; only the philosopher has experienced all three kinds of pleasure and so can judge between them; and the philosopher's pleasures are more real, less mixed with relief from pain. You can think these are bad arguments, but they are arguments about how the just man fares, which is Glaucon's question. Plato even ends with a deliberately absurd calculation that the king lives 729 times more pleasantly than the tyrant, a joke that admits the comparison isn't really arithmetic.

    Second, the health analogy is stronger than you allow. Nobody thinks a healthy man on the rack would be better off trading his health for a diseased body. The rack is terrible, but it doesn't make health worthless. Plato's claim is that justice is like that, only more so, because it is the health of the part of you that is most you.

    Where I agree with you is Book X. The return of the rewards always feels to me like Plato hedging his bets.

  2. Nikos Theodoridis

    Against Fellow

    Against. It's only a change of subject if you assume Glaucon's picture of the self. For Plato, from the Phaedo on, the person is the soul, and the body on the rack is in an important sense not him. So "better off" was always a question about the condition of the soul. Glaucon asks it with a different self in mind, and Socrates answers it about the self he thinks we actually are.

    That is not evasion. It is the deepest claim of the book, and the later Platonists built a whole way of life on it.