In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

41 Chapter One A Logic of Violence Or, How the Impossibility of Knowledge Renders All Communication Manipulation and All Relation a Power Struggle Where Do We Start? The Republic begins (at least) twice; after the relatively independent and yet incomplete mini-dialogue of book I, book II starts with an explicit da capo. Even once the conversation is underway, restarts and revisions occur repeatedly.1 The dialogue, it seems, runs into difficulty finding the right beginning , which is an unsettling difficulty if it is true that “the beginning is the most important part of every work” (337a). According to Socrates, “Everyone must therefore give great care to the beginning of any undertaking, to see whether his foundation is right or not.”2 Ironically, it is reported that Plato repeatedly revised the Republic, especially its opening lines.3 1. For example, in book I, Plato “tries out” several proposals for the meaning of justice and acknowledges that the procedure for adjudicating them is second best (348b); the ideal city undergoes more than one revision; Socrates insists that the method used to draw the analogy between city and soul is imprecise (436d); there are interruptions (419a, 449a) requiring aspects of the discussion to start again “from the beginning” (450a, 502e), and so forth. 2. Cra., 436d (Loeb translation). 3. D. L., III.37, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, De compositione verborum (New York: Classic Books, 1910), 25.209. See also Holger Thesleff, Studies in Platonic Chronology (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1982), 84–85, 107. Thesleff also describes the difference between modern publishing and the common ancient practice of repeated revision: 83–87. Cf. Phdr., 278d–e: “On the other hand, if a man has nothing more valuable than what he has composed or written, spending long hours twisting it around, pasting parts together and taking them apart—wouldn’t you be right to call him a poet or a speech writer or an author of laws?” See Alice Swift Riginos, Platonica: The Anecdotes Concerning the Life and Writings of Plato (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 185–86. Basil Mitchell and J. R. Lucas, An Engagement with Plato’s Republic: A Companion to the Republic 42 a logic of violence The reasons for the difficulty of finding an adequate beginning become apparent when we consider the radical nature of the question the dialogue intends to explore: inseparably both what justice is—justice being not only one among the virtues, but in some sense “virtue-ness” itself4—and also whether it is good. As attempt follows attempt we eventually discover that such a fundamental question cannot be addressed without also addressing the more universal questions of what truth and goodness are, and these in turn require some apprehension of that which is ultimate in relation to all other things. In order to understand the initial question, then, we must already in some sense know what comes after it, and ultimately must know what comes last of all. In other words, we cannot truly begin until we have reached the end. Or as Plato puts it more commonly, all learning is a kind of recollection.5 The notion of a “pure” or absolute beginning—which has been the aspiration in Enlightenment thought, German Idealism, and some forms of twentieth-century phenomenology—is foreign to Plato. Moving forward, for Plato, inevitably turns out to be in some respect a “catching up.” When Socrates starts speaking in the opening scene of the dialogue, he reports something that occurred the previous day and in this report relates that he began already by coming from somewhere else: “I went down yesterday to the Piraeus.” The natural question is: From where? Literally, we know that the trek from Athens to its nearby port slopes downward. But more profoundly, if we begin from knowledge of the dialogue as a whole, we recognize that the first word of the Republic, κατέβην, signals one of its central philosophical themes, the ascent and descent through the levels of being and their corresponding powers of soul.6 And if we consider the Greek mythical world more broadly, this philosophical theme resonates within another, that of the hero’s (Odysseus, Heracles) journey to Hades and (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003), 1, refer to a legend that Plato revised the dialogue thirty-seven times. Hegel specifies that Plato revised it seven times, and then adds that, ideally, a major philosophical undertaking out to be revised seventy times seven times. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, erster Teil, edited by Georg Lasson (Hamburg: Felix Meiner...

Share