Plato's Moral Realism: The Discovery of the Presuppositions of Ethics logic of desire: Aquinas on emotion

6. The Republic: The Finished Theory of Forms?

106 6 The Republic The Finished Theory of Forms? The Republic is Plato’s most ambitious and elaborate composition. While accomplishing considerable further steps in metaphysics, ethics, psychology, and aesthetics, it is also a Summa of insights gained in previous dialogues. It represents a sustained attempt to defend the possibility of morality by giving it as full a metaphysical underpinning as Plato can yet provide—for, as we shall see, that metaphysic will undergo modification and correction in later dialogues. In its present form—I shall look briefly at the view that the first book was originally a separate work—the Republic is an example of ring composition. Book one—set in the Piraeus, where the old arms manufacturer Cephalus is trying to put his life in order before his death—introduces the controlling theme of the Republic: the nature of justice, whether in the individual or in the state—and via the views of Thrasymachus presents a powerful account of the nihilism that Plato believes is the basic threat to morality and ethical politics (and the logical last stage of all “non-Socratic” accounts of morality) and that, he will argue, can only be escaped by resort to a substantive and objective metaphysics of morals. Books two to four offer an account of growth in the virtues from childhood on and of the appropriate psychological conditioning with which the full-fledged philosopher-statesman, adumbrated in earlier dia- 107 logues, must be equipped if he is to succeed in his eventually more mature search for practical and theoretical wisdom. With books five to seven we reach the core of the work: the metaphysics on which morality and rational politics must ultimately depend. With books eight and nine we watch a process opposite to that of books two to four: the slow decline, that is, of both society and the individual, from the philosopher king in charge of an ideal society to the tyrant struggling to maintain a despotism of his personal will. At that point we are finally positioned to give the only serious philosophical reply to Thrasymachean nihilism. Finally, with book ten, we first revisit a number of difficulties in the earlier books that could not then be tackled directly because books five to seven, treating of the theory of Forms, had not yet been proposed, before concluding with a response to Cephalus’ concern with his personal fate after death: a further “myth” of the afterlife and the general destiny and possible “salvation” of the human soul, whereby the antiThrasymachean can be seen not only to be “happier” in this present life, but also in the hereafter. Many scholars believe that the first book of the Republic was originally a separate “dialogue of definition.” As the Laches sets out to identify courage, so the first book of the Republic sets out to identify justice. That thesis cannot be refuted, but there is no reason to believe it true. The treatment of justice superficially resembles what we find in a number of the smaller, earlier Platonic dialogues, but a careful look at the present text reveals many important differences. All that may reasonably be said is that if there was an earlier version of the first book (perhaps entitled The Thrasymachus) we cannot know what it contained, and it is unlikely that it looked very similar to book one as we now have it. Our present text, as we shall see, is ideally suited to introduce the Republic as a whole, and both the character and the ideas of Thrasymachus represent, better than anything we have previously found in a Platonic dialogue, the kind of threat Plato saw hanging over objective morality and to which he offers his own answers in the course of the Republic itself. I shall The Republic 108 The Republic therefore not linger over any possible earlier version of the first book of the Republic; rather I treat it as an essential and integral part of the Republic as a whole. That stated, the methodology employed by Plato through his character Socrates is different in book one from that of the rest of the Republic. Book one resembles the earlier dialogues in that first Cephalus, then Polemarchus, then Thrasymachus are subjected to Socratic questioning: the manner of it must remind us of the triple movement of the Gorgias. Callicles, as he “ought” to have presented himself if he were to win the argument, appears...