[Music] at the beginning of the second book of the republic the argument is resumed and it's taken up and radicalized by glaucon and adamantis glaucon and adamantis are the key interlocutors for socrates because they're the upcoming talented ver potentially virtuous youth of athens and he wants to educate them in political knowledge and in moral knowledge and socrates is held off by glaucon and out of montes and glaucon goes first because glaucon is most brave in all things as it says at the beginning of book two and he since he was associated with socrates at the very beginning of the dialogue it seems there's some sort of affinity between socrates and glaucon from the very outset now glaucon and adamantis are brothers and they're both plato's brothers so he's writing his own family members and his talented capable brothers into the dialogue the most famous of the platonic dialogues so he immortalizes his own family which has a considerable status within athens and he shows or gives a microcosm of what a good education for talented youth might be like well glaucon says to socrates after this very dubious win over thrasymachus socrates do you wish to persuade us or really persuade us or just seem to persuade us now this difference between being and seeming is crucial to all the dialogues in some ways the source of philosophy is to be found in the distinction between the way things appear to be and the way they really are this being and seeing me seeming distinction is very important to socrates into philosophy it's not at all important to the sophists sophists say well look i don't care whether i seem to persuade you or really persuade you so long as you act as if i have persuaded you it's nothing to me so the difference between being and seeming is analogous to the difference between socrates and philosophy and thrasymachus and sophistry so when he when glaucon says ask the loaded question do you want to really persuade us or do you want to seem to persuade us all of the philosophical points that socrates makes to distinguish himself from the sophists are implied and brought into into play there so this being and seeming corresponds to the difference for example between words and definitions you'll notice that no sophists in any of the dialogues ever spend any time defining any terms sophists thrive on ambiguity socrates on the other hand is going to move from words to definitions from words or symbols to meanings because he thrives on the light he thrives on real articulate knowledge knowledge which is held together logically by a logos right an account or a reason and socrates of course rises to the challenge a challenge which he set up by beating thrasymachus badly by offering bad arguments by making the defense of justice look kind of wishy-washy he has lured thrasymachus or lured adamantis and glaucon into this argument so that's why he gives i think fairly weak arguments against thrasymachus glaucon says if you really want to persuade us rather than to seem to persuade us we have to have a radicalized conception of justice and i want you to prove that justice is good in and of itself that just is as good as an end not as a means and to do this he says look what we're going to have to do is look at what people say about justice and have you defend justice even in its most unattractive or at least apparently unattractive form imagine and he comes up with the theory with the myth of gaijins here glaucon says look imagine what happened with gaiji's ancestor gaijin was the king of lydia he says his ancestor was there was a shepherd for the king one day the earth opened up he went down and going up and down is going to be very important in this book whenever you see anybody going up or going down in this book underline it so down the shepherd goes shepherd and sheep think about thrasymachus in the first book of the republic right saying that you know the shepherd is interested not in the flock but in his own benefit shepard goes down and he sees a big bronze horse within the bronze horse is a man larger than life size and he's wearing a ring takes the ring off the shepherd and he goes back up and he finds that when this ring is turned inside out so the collet is down rather than up it makes him invisible as a result of this invisibility he goes and he kills the king he becomes a regicide he has sex with the king's wife and he takes control of the state key point here is that by having the ring of go well first of all i mean hollow horses play a very very big role in greek poetry right so it's a clear implied dig at homer right i mean it could have been a hollow anything it's a hollow horse and it's bronze and in a little while we'll find out what bronze means too right it means emotion or appetite and this man goes down so he moves from a state of at least naivete if not knowledge down to a morally inferior state to a state of moral ignorance and comes back up not improved but made worse this bad education because i think that the myth of guy jesus is a parable about a bad education comes back up and then subverts the political and moral order by committing adultery with the king's wife killing the king and taking control of the state bad education then leads to bad political results all right so we're foreshadowing some of the main themes of the republic uh the criticism of homer is there and this invisibility element means that what we're doing is essentially subtracting the body and looking just at the soul now glaucon says think about this socrates suppose a just man and an unjust man were to get this ring of gaijis the unjust man would clearly do all kinds of unjust things he would kill the king have sex with the king's wife and do all the things that he wanted to do the just man let's face it would do exactly the same thing because people are just and good only because they have they lack the capacity to do real injustice in other words they're weak and feeble and if people got the opportunity to do justice with impunity no one would do justice they would have a good time and they'd do all kinds of bad stuff so what this would mean then i mean it radicalizes through symbicus argument in the following sense thrasymachus says that justice is the advantage of the stronger what glaucon is essentially suggesting is that justice is the advantage of the weaker what he says is that lots of weak people that were incapable of becoming real tyrants got together and they said you know it's better for us to form something like a social contract so that we don't have to put up with having injustice done to us and we'll give up on doing injustice to other people because it hurts us more to have injustice done to us than it pleases us to do injustice to other people besides what kind of feeble incapable kind of pious people so that's no good for us the best we can do then according to glaucon is create a social contract which limits injustice even though everybody really knows that that's what's good for them that's what they really want so glaucon is essentially making an argument that might be made by someone called or by by an immoralist in other words we only do justice conventionally by nature if we could do uh or we only do justice conventionally by nature we would do injustice because that's naturally better for us he is replicating a distinction that is common among the sophists of greece at the time the distinction between nomos and phusis nomosis is political law law in the sense of convention law in the sense that you get speeding tickets phusis is natural law law in the sense of the law of gravity right one is uh the nomos is created by legislators created by human beings it's a a set of conventions nature has its own laws that are independent of those well socrates wants to collapse that distinction that's going to be a big part of the republic but for the for now in glaucon's radicalization of the argument for injustice he's doing the opposite he's saying no look by nature people want to be injust and that's good for them because it makes them happy it gratifies their desires but they invent these conventions to prevent themselves from being taken advantage of because they're weak now the brother adamantis chimes in he says before you go anywhere socrates let me explain to you that it's going to get even worse than this men when they tell their sons that they must be just they always tell them look you should be just because of what it gets you if you have a reputation for being a just man you can get elected to office you can get made you can be made general of an army you can rise high in the estimation of your neighbors but they always praise justice not because it's good intrinsically but rather because it's good for what it gets you it's good because of the reputation you get and also of course they praise justice because the gods like justice and there'll be divine retribution in the afterlife now adamante says stop and think about this for a second right adamato says look people make mistakes so if you're really smart at being unjust what you would do is seem just and seem good and seem virtuous and then be as bad as you possibly can this is the argument that machiavelli makes if you stop and think about it right i mean you should get away with whatever you can but you should look like you're a real good virtuous person if you do that then you have the best of both worlds because then you get to be unjust and in addition you get the reputation for justice so you get all the good things that come to the man who's reputed just and adamantly says in addition even though the gods don't make that kind of mistake they're not interested in reputation they can be bought remember what keflas did by giving sacrifices well suppose you become a tyrant or you do all kinds of injustice and you accumulate a tremendous amount of money and you take control of various holy places and you can perform the appropriate rights you give in other words you give the gods a percentage right and if you buy the gods off you perform the right number of sacrifices they'll be willing to forego their wrath they'll be no divine retribution so if a really unjust man were to be wise in his unjust injustice and he were to get the reputation among men for being very virtuous and in addition he would buy the gods off he's all set that shows you that injustice really is better so now they radicalize the argument together they say look or gotham says there are three kinds of good there are things that are good in and of themselves like health for the body that's just a good thing for itself there are things that are good for what they get you like oh i don't know like wealth wealth if you have it you can exchange for other things and that's good for what it will get you and there are other things that are good both for themselves and for what they get you and that kind of uh thing of good that's both a means and an end that's the kind of thing that we would like to see uh justice pr that we would like to see as our third kind of justice now take away all reputation take away all the things you get from justice show us that justice is good in and of itself that justice is to the soul what health is to the body that's a hard argument in addition let's take the you know the radical proposal i suppose a good man as the opposite of what adamantis was saying a good man is reputed to be unjust and people think him bad and they confiscate all his property and he's whipped and burned and killed and has terrible things done to him show us that that life of the virtuous man who is reputed to be unjust and who has terrible things done to him show us that that's a happier life than the unjust man that gets away with it a very difficult problem i mean it looks like socrates has been dug into a very deep hole here you know she has to show that justice and the virtue of the soul is good independent of all other extraneous features and even if it gets what it doesn't deserve even if it gets the wrong reputation among men and think about the fact that socrates is going to be an extremely just man who has a reputation that's the opposite of what it truly ought to be and the result is that he is killed by ignorant unjust men this is not just an intellectual exercise this is gesturing back at the trial and death of socrates right he's the unjust man reputed he's the just man reputed to be unjust that gets the consequences of the ignorance of the people around him so socrates is stuck i mean he says well i mean i'm just overwhelmed by the magnitude of your task now in some ways it's quite proper that he should be it's a very difficult argument second on the second hand though it's also true that socrates has been waiting for this argument he's been stepping back a little bit waiting for these boys to come on to give him an argument and make the hardest possible play in defense of justice so socrates says i have an idea and he introduces one of the main metaphors one of the main similes in the republic suppose we don't look in an individual man because it'll be hard to see justice or virtue of the soul if we look at an individual let's look at the city let's construct a city in speech and this city in speech will show us the virtues of the individual man magnified manifold and by seeing a large magnification of the virtue and vice of the soul and its wheel and woe we'll be able to find out what the status of justice is and whether it really is intrinsically good or not so the the glaucon adamantis brave virtuous young men say okay yeah that sounds like a good idea let's jump on it so adamantis leads off in his discussion with socrates and for the rest of book two they construct the minimum city based upon the idea of the division of labor and it's called the city of utmost necessity you get five or six or ten men together who are exchanging the products of their labor all right one man one job is established as the ideal because the division of labor so that each man takes one job means that each will be able to pursue one craft and pursue it well you find that the jack of all trades is master of none so we'll have a shoemaker we'll have a cloth maker we'll have a farmer we'll have a an iron worker and what will happen is that this city of utmost necessity will be tolerably just but will not have any luxuries will not have anything in the way of cultivation in other words there won't be any leisure left over for these people to develop things like civilization like greek culture there won't be much in the way of poetry or statues or large public buildings they'll live a sort of arcadian in a sort of arcadian simplicity well glaucon steps into the argument at that point it says look this is not my kind of city glaucon is a brave kind of guy and he likes to get a little bit extra he has that heroic tendency which could be very dangerous if he goes into political life without a thorough knowledge of political things right i mean the most virtuous and noble nature with a bad education will turn out to be the worst sort of person so glaucon comes in and says no this is a city for pigs this is not appropriate to human beings these people that are going to live in this simple life they're not going to have any of the nice things no relishes no couches no lovely things well socrates says you know you're right this city of utmost necessity this sort of non-luxurious city isn't going to satisfy most most truly human desires it will only satisfy our animal instincts so what will we have to add to have a more entertaining city well we'll have to have things like luxurious food and we'll have to have various kinds of imports and exports and we're going to have to have a hustle and bustle of foreigners coming through and trade relations and commerce and of course this means that we're going to have to have first of all more doctors because luxury will lead to various kinds of physical maladies in the individuals but the implication is always that anytime that the physical individual is sick or that the soul of the individuals that make up a society are sick you will have a soul sick political order as well so disorder in the individual body or soul means that there will be disorder in the collectivity the city is like the man so what we're going to get when we go beyond these moderate kind of minimal desires is we're going to have a great need for doctors and there are various kinds of other luxurious trades will come in there'll be you know cosmetics and there'll be various kinds of uh of beautiful poetry and various kinds of art and also there'll be war the source of war is in luxurious life in other words by trying to get more than you really need by trying to accumulate what you don't really have a need for what you do what you merely desire you're going to have to end up extending the borders of your society and taking what's not yours so we're going to need a couple of new things in this better is this improved or at least more luxurious city what socrates calls the feverish city the severe city will need doctors to take care of it but also it will doubtless need what doctors are to bodies this city will need some sort of political official to take care of it right to have you know to to cure the ills the genera that are generated by that and we will need some sort of soul doctor or political doctor and that soul doctor a political doctor will end up being the philosopher king one that can remedy these things by purging the city of the dangerous luxuries by changing the dangerous organization of the soul of the people making up this city well they put together the feverish city and now socrates says how are we going to get somebody to root to rule this city in other words they're going to need some sort of political order for it and it can't be this arcadian simplicity that we had in the city of pigs the best thing that we're going to get is noble men that can wield weapons that are warriors that will keep the laws and make sure that they're enforced but the difficulty is this how are we going to get these people not to be tyrannical in other words once they have control of the means of coercion how is it that they're not just going to run the city for their own good you don't want thracinicus and people like thrasymachus given all the weapons in the city and allowed to dominate they'll become tyrannical and our happiness which is a very dubious happiness the happiness of luxury to begin with will be made even more wretched all the luxuries will go to them and we will have a terrible factionalized city well glaucon doesn't know and socrates says you know what this reminds me of philosophical dogs now this is one of the great i mean one of the kind of inside jokes in the republic the idea of a philosophical dog is dopey but it ties into a number of metaphors we've already used remember the distinction between the shepherd and the sheep well what's in between the shepherd and the sheep is the sheepdog works for the shepherd but you wouldn't want the sheepdog to eat the sheep all right that comes back to the first book of the republic well socrates says well here's a great thing about philosophical dogs and clearly this is meant as broad humor they like what they know in other words if a dog knows you doesn't matter if you're a good man or a bad man as long as the dog knows you'll come up and lick your hand and it won't be a problem but even if a virtuous stranger comes up the dog barks he doesn't like strangers so what we want then in our guardians in these people that will control the laws control the the politics of our city we want them to know their own to know the members of their city to know the institutions of their city and to love their city and to be antagonistic to others this will defend us from others and this will allow us to exert our control over others because we're going to have to expand right one of the results of this luxury is an expansionistic foreign policy well they say how shall we educate our warriors then in such a way as to make them like philosophical dogs so they love what they know but on the other hand are antagonistic to that which is external and foreign in other words this antagonism to the external and to the foreign is an antagonism towards change towards things that are different plato throughout this book is going to be fighting a running battle against history he says stop the world stop historical development i want this to be frozen in time once plato gets a good city a good political order well then any change is deterioration so that means that once you get it right if we manage to find out what the ideal good city is then we have to completely arrest all changes one of the most important mechanisms for the arresting of change is to create a warrior elite that is antagonistic to all innovation remember that in the ancient world to call someone an innovator is generally speaking a put down you know it's an accusation nowadays in a kind of much more modern society that we have today to call someone an innovator is praise 25 centuries ago it was not praised it was an accusation so what plato wants to do is eliminate all innovation he's going to get the job right the first time figure out what the good society is and that's capital t the good society and then once we do that freeze all change the way to do that is to make the rulers like philosophical dogs they love their own all right and their own is the city all right now how will we educate these philosophical dogs well two things minimally we'll have to give them we'll have to give them a music education and here i don't mean just playing the piano what i mean is an education in the muses in all the arts poetry and literature and music and dance and things of that kind because that softens the hard nature of our guardians and that makes them harmonious and harmonious souls are one of the key things for plato this harmonious connection between the various elements in the soul and in addition they have to study gymnastics because gymnastics makes the body tough and lean and vigorous and capable and the point is that gymnast that gymnastic training training is to the body what music training is to the soul not in the restricted sense but in the enlarged sense of music so play platonic education for these guardians will be addressed to the needs of the body and the needs of the soul using the muses and gymnastic and the result will be superior creatures in other words people with good educations will have good bodies and good souls they will look like those beautifully austere classical greek statues have you ever seen any of those even the roman copies of them they're just lovely i mean they're very moving and there's a certain sort of ideal which you know that the sculptor had in his mind when he decided to cut that out of the rock well plato is doing something analogous he is cutting an ideal not out of rock but out of words but if you think about what the ideal guardian will look like it will look like the gymnasts at the olympics they are just perfect bodies in addition to that much more important than that is the fact that they will have analogous souls souls that have been developed and exercised and trained so that they are the epitome the high point of what human beings can possibly be both in body and soul this is i think one of the great achievements of greek culture this unity of body and soul now in plato the body becomes something of a problem it becomes somewhat superfluous or not superfluous but uh becomes less important than the mind right it's kind of a change over from homer but this concern about the health or happiness the the the good state of the soul in the body is crucial to this kind of an education all right so the guardian is going to be given the muses and gymnastics now when we teach them the muses what are we going to teach them well the educator of greece is homer and plato one of the big targets of book three of the republic is the attack on homer here's what's going on there plato knows that the most influential educational figure in greek life is homer and almost all young men because they're the only ones that get much in the way of an education are taught homer from their boyhood on and they know a quote from homer for just about every circumstance the difficulty is is that homer gives immoral advice and his heroes do immoral things the wrath of achilles is not the behavior of a good man right the lies of odysseus suggest that odysseus is a little too clever for his own good they are constantly doing immoral things and if they get away with it homer praises them so the difficulty is that homer has been influential but his influence his influence has been largely pernicious plato thinks that one of the greatest sources of political evil and moral evil in the athens of his time is the fact that people have gotten a bad education from homer plato intends to be the new homer he's going to be the new educator of greece and he's got a new ideal that he's going to set above the homeric hero and that's the socratic hero the hero of knowledge rather than the hero of slaughter the whole point a little later on i'll get to this in a second the whole point of subordinating the silver class the class of heroic warriors who fight bravely in the interest of the city subordinating them to the gold is the reevaluation of all values they're demoting the homeric hero from the top of the line of greek heroes down to number two this will be heroism or warrior prowess under the guidance and direction of knowledge that's what the difference between silver and bronze is all about in other words he's demoting the homeric hero and offering greece a new and higher and finer ideal socrates over achilles socrates is the new achilles socrates in the apology directly compares himself to achilles why well first of all because the only person only poet that the audience is likely to know is homer and he's trying to get right in the audience's face by saying well look i'm dressed in shabby stuff and i'm an old man and i haven't done very much in war lately on the other hand i'm a tremendously heroic individual would that you understood it so plato is making that argument again and again in the republic that the homeric hero is a pre-literate old-fashioned evil hero that has a bad effect on our new literate numerate culture we have to have a new hero of knowledge not slaughter that's a that's a a heroism that has come and gone so plato intends to wrap up greek culture i mean in the in the sense of creating new moral ideals nietzsche would really have liked this project it's a revaluation of all values well he gives a whole bunch of quotes from homer in the beginning and they're all references to achilles and what a wicked man achilles is now if achilles is a wicked man surely we can't use homer or at least an unadulterated honest uncensored homer to teach our guardians it will teach our guardians to do bad things i don't want the guardians sulking in their tents if they have a slave girl taken away i want them out here when they're told if we are going to do that the only way to do that will be to get the guardians a new set of poets we will have our own poets to supersede homer or we'll give them the expregated version of homer in which homer tells people to do really nice things or really virtuous things in other words those times when homer stumbles upon the moral truth we will certainly make everyone learn homer those parts of homer in which the here the homeric heroes do bad things we will get rid of it so we'll have the censorship of the poets it is an anti-liberal anti-modern idea plato is not trying to write legislation for the modern world he's trying to write legislation for post peloponnesian war athens that lost the philippine asian war largely because they overextended themselves because they were full of hubris and pride and foolish stuff like that one of the things that plato most objects to in the in contemporary athenian politics is the fact that we went and developed an empire which caused us to lose that war and caused us to get devastated and we were trying to control other people we couldn't even control ourselves plato wants to show us how to control ourselves and after we control ourselves and organize our own souls he wants the city that we participate in to be similarly organized and then possibly we may extend if we feel a need or a necessity but that's not our big goal our goal is self-control not the control of others we want to organize the internal reality not the external reality soul comes first in plato keep that in mind now the end of book three socrates introduces the myth of metals another anti-enlightenment idea mythometalus is also connected to the noble lie now this is going to take some finessing because plato and socrates are great friends of the truth what makes a noble lie noble you would think that lies would be evil because they're not truthful what can we do with the idea of the noble lie well the noble lie is this uh we're supposed to tell the people that we have given the various kinds of training uh we train some people to be bronze and craftsmen we train other people to be silver and defenders of the society we're eventually also going to train one or a small group of people to be philosopher kings to be professional knowers who are also going to run the society how are we going to keep this three parts of the city separate and how are we going to keep one from trying to move into the status of another how are we going to prevent social mobility in a sense well socrates wants to do with a noble lie he wants to do it by saying look you are all brothers and sisters you all came from the earth you're all born in the earth and in the process of forming you in some cases the god put in gold which makes you philosopher kings in other cases the god put in silver that makes you guardians particularly the warriors or defenders and everyone else is in fact bronze and everyone should be satisfied with their lot so it's a completely hierarchical society with just about nothing in the way of social mobility if a child born of bronze or silver parents shows great promise it can be moved up a notch or a child of gold parents can be moved or silver parents can move down a notch but for the most part it's a completely fixed rigid hierarchical society and plato thinks that not everyone has equal access to knowledge and reason and for that reason he doesn't adopt the kind of open society that you know would be advocated by someone like carl popper but also any of the enlightenment thinkers he doesn't have that optimistic idea that yeah if you just give everybody education everyone will understand what they should do and they'll all be able to vote for good governments plato doesn't think that he saw these you know this early democracy kill socrates he saw this early democracy do all kinds of evil he saw this early democracy make bad decisions and lose the peloponnesian war and get themselves all killed and conquered so he thinks that democracy is an intrinsically unstable polity um if you look at any of his treatments of the demons think about the euthademus when all the people of athens that are listening to this heuristic dialogue are all clapping and saying that this is a great thing obviously people that think that that's real reasoning are not going to be able to make wise political decisions that's going to be in the hands of a tiny elite in plato's ideal city so what we're going to have here is careful censorship of epic poetry and also tragedy and comedy remember that aristophanes give socrates a very bad name it was one of the reasons that that socrates was condemned all poetry will be censored and supervised by the guardians they will decide what the what myth the people will get and what they won't get the point being that this will give them a good education good education will result in good souls good souls result in an orderly life and an orderly life means an orderly city what we are trying to do is avoid the faction that we get based upon bad education and also based upon tremendous disparities in wealth one of the most interesting facts about plato's ideas in the third book is that the elite for the first time or perhaps for the first time in the history of the world is going to be an ascetic elite it's not necessarily that they're going to fast or starve but the gold and silver that the small strata that actually runs society are not allowed to own any private property they're not allowed to have their own families they're not allowed to get married they're not allowed to uh to actually touch gold and silver so they are going to be separated off and that means i mean if you know marx the plato's elite is going to extract the smallest possible amount of surplus value in other words the gold and the silver only gets subsistence wages and that means out of the gross national product or the gross civic product the smallest possible slice of the pie is given to the people that actually have the political power which means that the maximally large slice of the pie goes back to the people that actually produce it the actual craftsmen and workers what this means is that in the economic sense not in the political sense but in the economic sense this is the least oppressive regime possible because every other regime the ruling elite takes out more than a minimum subsistence and since everything comes from some place it has to come from the backs of the workers here the bronze people the craftsmen the people that actually produce things the farmers are going to be the ones that get back the maximum possible return on their labor so in that respect and strictly in the sense of the extraction of surplus value it'll be the least oppressive of regimes on the other hand there'll be nothing in the way of political democracy this is a regime that's clearly top down in every case now this is a very radical idea this is truly the most radical set of political proposals you know in the history of the west and adamantius at the beginning of book four says socrates look you have the gold and the silver and they get the smallest slice of the pie possible elsewhere as you know they would starve um they're never going to be happy how are you going to make a happy ruling elite because alemantis is interested in joining the athenian ruling elite and he comes from a wealthy family and he'd like to be happy and he says look they're not going to be happy unless they have nice big houses and lots of food and nice things i mean you know how why can't they have any possessions that doesn't make any sense socrates says no the point of this regime is not the good of some subset it's the good of the whole he thinks of of his ideal city as being a sort of organic unity so we're not trying to make your uh the hand happy or the head happy or the foot happy we want the happiness of the entire body and the way to do that is to have each element in society perform its function and not do anything else this comes back to the idea of telos plato and socrates are very much concerned with the idea of telos which means purpose or function each element in society the gold the silver and the bronze is to perform its own function and not any other function and if it performs that function it will perform that function well and if it leaves the other functions alone something else will perform that function this is what justice is at least one of the provisional definitions of justice each part of the society like each part of the soul doing that performing that function which it is naturally suited to perform so the bronze people will have the function of producing this necessities of life and they will get back as much as possibly can and they'll be kept in an orderly safe city the bronze part of the individual human soul the part that has appetites and desires the desire for food the desire for clothing the desire for warmth the desire for sex the desire for all the things that people want that will correspond to that you want and the appropriate virtue to the bronze people in society and the appropriate virtue to the human soul is moderation you want to have some control or organization of your emotions of your desires you don't want to abolish them we can't we wouldn't be human if we lacked all human desire but to be virtuous both as individuals and as a city we must organize our desiring parts the silver part plato calls the spirited in the city that's going to be the defenders the actual warriors that will be raised for war from the very beginning and this in many respects borrows the best elements of sparta and brings them into athens remember that sparta won the peloponnesian war and for plato to write so many spartan customs into his ideal city is a real slap in the face to his contemporaries saying look the reason we that sparta overcame athens in the peloponnesian war at least partially is because they are more virtuous than we are their institutions are better conceived so many of the ideas that we're going to see in sparta like a common housing common training table uh this community of property and community of activity at least for the young and for the vigorous for the warriors derived directly from sparta and is the kind of thing that will not be accepted gladly among the athenians the final element in the city in the soul is the gold element the gold element is the philosopher kings in the city the particularly wise and virtuous rulers that have seen the form of the good that understand true true political uh knowledge and that part of the soul is the reasoning capacity so there's a definite correspondence between the three parts of the soul and the three parts of the city because the city is like the man that similarly runs all through the republic by the time we get to the end of book four we finished off the education of the guardians and we get the platonic virtues and this is the best statement of plato's conception of the happy soul and the happy city turns out that justice is a combination of the wise the courageous and the moderate you know the three parts of the soul and the three virtues appropriate to those parts of the soul and their harmonious interaction is what we mean by justice so justice is a kind of harmony between the virtues of the three parts of the soul now go back when you read the republic and note the fact that adam that adamantis is a very moderate austere man and his brother glaucon is most brave in all things adamantis is the best of the desiring parts he's uh he has he's the embodiment of moderation glaucon is the embodiment of courage he's most brave in all things he talks about swords and war all the time and socrates is the embodiment of wisdom and this harmonious interaction in books two three four and five of glaucon adamantis and socrates is justice in other words it's the harmonious interaction of the wise the courageous the moderate and the just that doesn't exhaust the symbolism here by any means what we get in the republic is a sort of multi-valence symbolism where one symbol piles upon another so but at least within the confines of books through two through five um wisdom courageous wisdom courage moderation is socrates glaucon and adamantis and their interaction is justice which leads them to knowledge of justice right there's quite a bit going on a very busy set of books now at the end of uh book four we've pretty much established the platonic virtues the wise the courageous the moderate and the just we figured out the parts of the soul the parts of the city and we found out that justice is to the soul as health is to the body but now a very curious thing happens a very important passage is going to be found at the beginning of the fifth book it's the only passage where polemicus and thrasymachus are brought back in i mean and only for a very brief piece and adamantis steps in what happens is this beginning of the fifth book and i should emphasize that there were no books back then they were all put on scrolls scholars broke this up into ten books for their utility well beginning of the fifth book polemicus says something whispers something into the ear of adamantius and adamanta says yeah you know i will ask him fine adamat is bravely steps forward now this is out of character veradomontes adamantis hasn't been interested in war and stuff like that he's been a very moderate restrained kind of quiet figure very austere but he steps forward and bravely says socrates i'm arresting you for a second time it's a recapitulation of that first scene in the first book he steps in and says socrates don't go anywhere we thought you were going to tell us about this strange business about the community of women and the abolition of the family and the abolition of private property and all this strange stuff that you're suggesting and now you want to go right on to the degenerate regimes until now that you've given us the good regime tell us about the bad one no no no we insist that you stay you stop right now and you explain to us all this business about communism and about the abolition of private property and the abolition of the family and all this stuff that strikes us as very peculiar well socrates says i didn't want to get involved with this right which is can be read ironically but possibly also is true as well said it's a very difficult thing you're asking me to do because i'm afraid of being overwhelmed by the waves of the argument well glaucon who is most brave in all things comes back and says look speak away we won't hold anything against you come on let's hear what you got well this is the i guess the most radical departures that we're going to get in the public book five he says there are three waves to the argument and if you thought my argument was strange to begin with and hard to believe to begin with it's going to get even harder to believe and even more peculiar the first wave that socrates has to face is feminism remember that we're talking about 25 centuries ago and the status of women was i mean not even approximately or remotely equal to that of men they were kept secured away in a women's quarter within their the households they didn't engage in public life they didn't certainly didn't go to war and socrates is suggesting that men and women should get the same education now if they get the same education we can only assume that they're going to be performing the same sort of functions in society and it appears that they are socrates remember is primarily interested in minds not bodies and women when they do arithmetic or geometry they get the same answer that men do what that means is they have the divine logos in them and of course plato is going to take that the whole way he says look bodies are relatively accidental things and god knows at the end of the book at the myth of earth we're going to find out that people are going to get reincarnated anyway right so naturally he doesn't care what sort of genitalia a person is attached to he cares about their mind their psyche their soul this is a book about souls the perfectability of souls bodies don't interest him very much so he's going to say men and women have to get the same education and apart from strictly physical things you know like heavy lifting um they're going to have the same functions in society makes sense our our our dogs both the male and the female must be given the same job guarding the sheep and our dogs in the in the bronze area or in the gold area are going to get the same education appropriate to their status and that way we can have eugenics and all that other kind of stuff so the first wave of the argument is feminism which is a completely radical idea i mean and it's the first of the great he's the first of the great feminist authors in the western tradition right why because he emphasizes mind over body the second wave is communism he's going to completely abolish the family which is surely i mean even more radical than feminism i mean the family is one of those lasting institutions that however we modify it i mean it seems to be here to stay he says no if we're going to have the really the best people in the society the guardians particularly the philosophy kings must create phony lots so that we have eugenic marriages so that we have the best men and the best women reproduce so the next generation will be even superior to the generation that we have now so we're gonna have a gradual program of eugenics and this eugenics program where we carry down carried on surreptitiously and it will give people that much more of a stimulus to do well because it turns out that the people that behave well and perform well are the ones we end up breeding so they will live a very austere life and the idea is this plato wants to break down the distinction between public good and private good that's why he's abolishing the family in the interest of creating family ties of family relationships across the city as a whole in other words all the members of the guardian class all the silver and all the gold should view the whole city as being their own their family their particular private thing so private and public good will be unified and i don't know that it is successful this attempt to abolish the family in the interest of creating a kind of general cohesion within society on the other hand one of the persistent problems that we get in modern liberal society is this conflict between the private good and the public good right we haven't really resolved this so i would be inclined to think this isn't an especially plausible way of resolving it by abolishing the family although people have tried that the point is though that it remains a problem and even if his solution is not satisfactory to identify this conflict between public and private good as a basic political problem is i think a real advance here now the third of these waves and the last are the waves that socrates deals with and the waves are getting bigger all the time i mean feminism was a big wave you can be washed away by that surely a very peculiar idea for you know 400 bc or you know 380 bc the abolition of the family even more radical but the final one is the practicality of the philosopher king here's the problem plato says well look or glaucon says okay i'm convinced this is a really a great achievement and that you know you've shown me something very important i feel in some ways bad about this the argument that i proposed that maybe it's better to be good to be evil than to be good now that i look at justice and injustice i've really made a mistake but is this philosopher king really possible can we have this kind of a city and it seems that there's a sort of resistance by the empirical physical world of tables and chairs towards all of platonic ideals and towards the perfect city that plato suggests and the philosopher king suggests to us that there's some sort of disjunction between theory and practice that we can't quite realize in the world of space and time the world of nature the ideals that we would hope or that we would aspire towards now it seems then that this idea of the philosopher king has some kind of big problem attached to it in other words if our theory can't be brought into practice that gives us the idea that something is drastically amiss and that's true according to plato the fact that we cannot realize the good regime that we cannot realize the philosopher king that we cannot create perfect justice in this world shows us that something is very definitely wrong with this world