书名：人应该如何生活
副标题：柏拉图《王制》释义
作者： （美）布鲁姆著
出版社：华夏出版社
ISBN：9787508085449
出版时间：2015
页数：194
定价：39.00
内容简介： 学者对于《王制》的解释作品可谓汗牛充栋，布鲁姆的释义之所以别具一格、极富魅力，在根本上是因为他特出的思想素质和语言才华。他长期浸润在政治哲学中，对于《王制》更是钻研经年，每一个见解、每一处论断都是他深思熟虑、反复孕育的产物，故如河蚌炼珍珠，满篇皆珠玑。加上他的语言通俗易懂，流利畅达，说理透彻，富于情感，这就使本书远远超出了一般理论家和学术人的局限，不仅会让已经具有一定知识基础和思想能力的人读后感到过瘾，还会对于一般大学生和社会读者散发出迷人的魅力。这是思想原本就该具有的气质和风貌。所以，本书既是学者深入研究《王制》的必备，又是学生初步探索《王制》的指引，还是更多喜爱经典作品、热衷通识教育的人们借以进行自我提升的好材料。 布鲁姆（Allan Bloom，1930－1992）是政治哲人施特劳斯（Leo Strauss）门下最有名气和成就的弟子之一。他的学术成就包括英译柏拉图的《王制》和卢梭的《爱弥尔》，代表性著作除了对美国社会发生广泛影响的畅销书《走向封闭的美国精神》外，还有《爱与友谊》、《莎士比亚的政治学》等。其作品已译成中文的有《走向封闭的美国精神》、《巨人与侏儒》（文集）、《爱的阶梯》（《会饮》释义，附在刘小枫先生的中译本后），一经面世便俘获了大量读者的心灵与头脑。 , 这套丛书还有 《柏拉图学说指南》,《苏格拉底与希琵阿斯》,《《法义》导读》,《游叙弗伦》,《论柏拉图式的爱》 等。 浑身颤抖。太厉害。爱欲的政治化或者哲学化。对智慧的热爱也是爱欲的一种形式。在意识到自己根本上的有限性和不完善从而渴望整全，不朽和善上，僭主和哲人在激情和专注上是一致的！僭主与哲人都诞生于民主制。血气与保卫捍卫一个人自己的东西（家中物）密切相关，而哲学爱欲是超出城邦的。血气敌视哲学。爱欲即政治！哲学与诗教之争本质在于争夺立法权--对城邦之整全的观照：诗人模仿立法者，又百般迎合听者口味；诗人给出自然的... 浑身颤抖。太厉害。爱欲的政治化或者哲学化。对智慧的热爱也是爱欲的一种形式。在意识到自己根本上的有限性和不完善从而渴望整全，不朽和善上，僭主和哲人在激情和专注上是一致的！僭主与哲人都诞生于民主制。血气与保卫捍卫一个人自己的东西（家中物）密切相关，而哲学爱欲是超出城邦的。血气敌视哲学。爱欲即政治！哲学与诗教之争本质在于争夺立法权--对城邦之整全的观照：诗人模仿立法者，又百般迎合听者口味；诗人给出自然的幻想，受习俗影响；然而诗人又公开直白地说出了人身上自然及激情的真理，该真理为法律所压制。这些真理赋予人生活的意义。诗人坦白了德性与幸福的非此即彼。怜悯是一种与个人可能遭受的痛苦相关的激情，人在怜悯中认出生存的威胁，继而恐惧。被怜悯和恐惧压倒的人求助于诸神和习俗，他不得不依恋洞穴。灵魂是真正的哲学问题 思想回到了一年前读理想国的时候，读书笔记的名字叫《在正义与真理之间》，看来读懂了一半的苏格拉底，也算有一点慧根。政治哲学本来就是一门不可为的学问，苏格拉底想要告诉我们的，无非是正义无需为其辩白，如同哲学家也不需要在法庭前申辩一样。痛苦在于自己只能是此世的庸众，无法追求真正的普遍性 政制可以被改善，但不能被完美化。不义将永远持存。政治理想主义是人类最具破坏性的激情。 人应该如何生活？标准答案并不存在。爱欲与血气的张力同时也是超越洞穴的动力。 在大学里认识了许多人，确切说他们不存在于我所处的现实中，但却是一个个围绕着不朽的影子。于是我多想和不朽照一照面，可是身处黑暗洞穴的我又怕见到刺目的阳光一般瞎了眼睛。于是我谨小慎微地、与周围墙面上的影子对话，告诉他们，我想与不朽谈一场精神恋。或许这场精神恋早... 尽管这本书的题目叫做人应该如何生活，但是它跟那些诸如《年轻人究竟怎样生活才有意义》、《如何在KTV出人头地》、《如何上网游戏》之类的书完全不属于一个类别。 此书出自Allan Bloom之手，如何知道布鲁姆的呢？原本只是知道理想国的英文信译本是由他翻译的，不过在那里面是见... 有位朋友说： 我有个疑惑，柏拉图的那本书，商务译为《理想国》，含有这本书里讨论的仅仅是思辨上推导出来的政制，非现实的。为什么现在套用《王制》这个中国古书名？固然《王制》也理论想象的东西，但这是中国古代策士提出的治国策这类东西，与柏拉图哲学思辨的推导不是同类... 布鲁姆实际上是在紧紧恪守施特劳斯阅读柏拉图的原则的基础上对文本的更加细致的解读。如果能参照施特劳斯《城邦与人》《古典政治理性主义的重生》（“苏格拉底问题”）以及施特劳斯对《会饮》的解读，这种承继性就会更加明显。 译笔稍显别扭。 解读的中心线索是哲学与城邦政... 那么，在一个不可能的城邦上花费这么多时间和努力有什么用？——正是为了显示这个城邦的不可能性。这个城邦恰恰不是任何城邦，而是一个为了满足正义的所有需求而被建构出来的城邦。它的不可能性，表明了一个正义政制之实现的不可能性，从而缓和了一个人在看到不够完美的政... 如译者所言，布鲁姆原文，字字珠玑。 经译者一翻，每页每段每句，无比垃圾。 这烂翻译，还有人打高分，打分者也是垃圾。 随便举个例子，本书第101页全页，有哪怕1句译对了么? 译者用“一”之多，到了脑残的地步。 “a”不是必须翻成“一个”、“一种”、“这一”，“那一”……... 读完很是激动，感觉不是在读《理想国》解读，而是在读另外一本书，一个人。话说，这算不算是对柏拉图的现代理解，不过我很想信服布鲁姆的解说，因为真的很解惑啊，我质疑布鲁姆的解释，大概是因为我自己读这本书的时候很多地方没读懂，但读懂的地方很受启发，很有趣。 问题点 p... 在此书的前言里，布鲁姆提到尼科尔斯（第22页），不清楚是否为昨天我微信里说的那书的作者，如果是，尼科尔斯也是施派中人。并可订正一下我昨天之误。 本书是对《王制》各卷的讲解，按布鲁姆的话是本书“倚重于斯特劳斯在《城邦与人》中关于《王制》的权威论述”。 施派对现代... 这是个过着纯粹知识生活学者翻译给自己看的书，他不经意间看到芸芸众生茫然的生活状态，于是将自己的所得，分享给我们，希望我们的生活能渐渐符合德性。 这是个尊崇自己知识和理想的学者，他是个诚挚的朋友。这个朋友即将要离开我居住的城市了，我现在认真阅读他的书，希望在他... (357a-367e) Bound by its ancestral laws and myths, the city, like Thrasymachus, does not raise the question of nature; in fact it hinders the question from arising. It wishes to give the accidents of this time and place the same status as the unchanging principles of all things. It presents a certain combination of nature and convention as the horizon within which its citizens must live and act... 2019-03-15 07:33  4人喜欢 (357a-367e)Bound by its ancestral laws and myths, the city, like Thrasymachus, does not raise the question of nature; in fact it hinders the question from arising. It wishes to give the accidents of this time and place the same status as the unchanging principles of all things. It presents a certain combination of nature and convention as the horizon within which its citizens must live and act. The first effort of philosophy or science was to sort out the various elements in our experience, to discover the true cause of lightning, eclipses, etc., by means of investigation unhampered by authority. Philosophy had to liberate itself from the weight of respectable opinion and to become aware of the existence of rationally comprehensible principles of the phenomena seen in the heavens; in other words, nature had to be discovered against the will of the city.Glaucon presents the political supplement to pre-Socratic natural philosophy: the city limits men in the pursuit of the good things, but its only justification for doing so is the need to preserve itself.Adeimantus reveals his deepest wishes by insisting that justice be easy and pleasant. It should in itself incorporate the advantages conventionally said to result from its practice. The poets promise just men great honors and sensual pleasures in this life and the next. Without making it quite explicit, Adeimantus longs for justice itself to be like or to be an adequate substitute for these honors and pleasures.We must first discover what a healthy city is and what a healthy soul is. The very coming to awareness of such a city and soul transforms and educates these young men.(369b-372e)Socrates suggests that the bodily desires are very simple and easy to satisfy. In this he is not unlike Rousseau in his opposition to Hobbes. The more complicated desires, the ones that cause the injustice of which Glaucon has spoken, are the result of a mixture of the desires of the body with the desires of the soul. Although the entrance of these desires connected with the soul serves to corrupt this first city, Socrates looks on them with more favor than does Rousseau, for they are the first manifestations of a longing for a natural perfection higher than that of the body.Glaucon’s desire to rule is the expression of an independently noble impulse which, if fully developed, would find its satisfaction only in contemplation and would wish to overcome the body’s desires in order to enjoy its own peculiar pleasure undisturbed. His passionate nature has been tutored by the common opinions about what is good and by the materialist philosophy of which he has heard. Glaucon is thus a dangerous man but also an eminently interesting and educable one. His desires lead him to despise law and convention; as long as his limitless desires have as their objects the things he lists as desirable in his speech, he will long for tyranny. But it is precisely this freedom from law and convention combined with his passion that may enable him to climb to the human peaks. As is the case with all the young men most attractive to Socrates, Glaucon has a potential for good or evil. With Glaucon, we have the opportunity of seeing how Socrates educates and his effect on the young. He undertakes a perilous activity but one full of promise.Socrates fulfills the harsh conditions Glaucon set for the just man, but also lives in great pleasure. He does not live without the ordinary pleasures because he is an ascetic, but because the intensity of his joy in philosophy makes him indifferent to them. Once Glaucon can see the possibility of such a way of life he will be cured of his desire for tyranny.The solution to the political problem embodied in Adeimantus’ city is not a human one. A human solution requires the emancipation of desire, for only then can virtue arise. Humanity requires a self-overcoming; not because life is essentially struggle, but because man’s dual nature is such that the goods of the soul cannot be brought to light without the body’s being tempted and, therefore, without a tyranny of soul over body.(372e-376c)War is requisite to the emergence of humanity; as the city of sows was gentle and reflected a fundamental harmony among men, so the city of warriors is harsh and reflects a fundamental conflict among men. Paradoxically this is the first human city. A city cannot claim that it does not harm other men; its justification can only be in the quality of life it provides for its citizens.血气Spiritedness is a difficult motive to understand, and its character can only be seen by contrasting it with desire. Desires are directed to the satisfaction of a need: they express an incompleteness and yearn for completeness. Hunger, thirst, sexual desire, etc., are all immediately related to a goal and their meaning is simple. The goal of spiritedness is much harder to discern. Its simplest manifestation is anger, and it is not immediately manifest what needs are fulfilled by anger. Spiritedness seems characterized more by the fact that it overcomes desire than by any positive goal of its own. Moreover, the desires related to the body—which are the only ones that have appeared thus far—all have a self-preservative function, whereas spiritedness, on the contrary, is characterized by an indifference to life. It may indeed aid in the preservation of life, but it can just as well place honor above life. The city may exist for the sake of life, but it needs men who are willing to die for it.Spiritedness really represents a new part of the soul, one which will rule the desires and establish a principle of hierarchy in the soul. Warriors’ services cannot be measured by money, for money is a standard for evaluating the contributions made toward the satisfaction of desire or the preservation of life. Spiritedness is beyond the economic system. Only men who pursue self-preservation and the gratification of bodily desire can be counted on to act according to the principles of economic “rationality.”However that may be, the city needs defenders, and it also now needs rulers, for its feverish desires make living together impossible without control.Socrates most surprisingly draws the conclusion that the good guardian is possible if, in addition to being spirited, his nature is philosophic. In a book famous for the proposal that philosophers be kings, this is the first mention of philosophy or philosophers. Philosophy is invoked in the city only for the purpose of solving a political problem.The philosophers are gentlemen because they pursue knowledge and not gain; their object does not entail exploitation of others. The love of knowledge is a motive necessary to the rulers of this city in order to temper their love of victory and wealth. But the philosophers are the opposites of the dogs inasmuch as they are always questing to know that of which they are ignorant, whereas the dogs must cut themselves off from the unknown and are hostile to foreign charms. They love their own and not the good. And this must be so, for otherwise they would not make the necessary distinction between their flock and those who are likely to attack it. The warrior principle is doing good to friends and harm to enemies. It is true that their love of the known extends their affections beyond themselves to the city; it partakes of the universalizing or cosmopolitan effect of philosophy. But that love ends at the frontier of the city. They remain the irrational beasts who love those who mistreat them as well as those who are kind to them. No mention is made of the fact that dogs do not characteristically love the flocks but the masters to whom the flock belongs and who teach them and command them to care for the flock. These dogs as yet have no masters and are therefore incomplete. The masters whom they will know and hence love are philosophers and knowers. The dogs’ nature opens them to the command of philosophy but does not make them philosophers.(376c-383c)Courage, moderation, and justice—three of the four cardinal virtues defined in the Republic—are each mentioned in the context of the critique of poetry, but the fourth, wisdom, is not. It would seem necessary to infer that the warriors are not to be wise and that the beliefs about the gods are their substitute for wisdom. Those beliefs about the gods are a nonphilosophic equivalent of knowledge of the whole. The first segment of the study of poetry constitutes, therefore, a theology, a theology not true but salutary. Its doctrines are simple: the gods are good; they are the cause of the good; and they do not deceive.Gods must be good and can only cause good; the deeper teaching implied here is that the good is the highest and most powerful principle of the cosmos. As opposed to the earlier views of the first things which the poets express, chaos is not the origin of all things; and the universe is fundamentally a cosmos, not a battlefield of contrary and discordant elements, as the poets represent it to be in their terrible tales of the family lives and wars of the gods.Statesmen require a human prudence in which the gods can give them no guidance. This reform of the poetic account of the gods leads to the consequence that in the future the poetic depictions of the gods cannot serve as models for human conduct.(386a-392c)阿基里斯Socrates brings Achilles to the foreground in order to analyze his character and ultimately to do away with him as the model for the young. The figure of Achilles, more than any teaching or law, compels the souls of Greeks and all men who pursue glory. He is the hero of heroes, admired and imitated by all. And this is what Socrates wishes to combat; he teaches that if Achilles is the model, men will not pursue philosophy, that what Achilles stands for is inimical to the founding of the best city and the practice of the best way of life. Socrates is engaging in a contest with Homer for the title of teacher of the Greeks—or of mankind. One of his principal goals is to put himself in the place of Achilles as the authentic representation of the best human type. One need only look at their physical descriptions to recognize that they are polar opposites. Socrates is attempting to work a fantastic transformation of men’s tastes in making the ugly old man more attractive than the fair youth.With his analysis of Achilles, Socrates is actually beginning a critique of the courage based on spiritedness which is thus also a critique of the warrior class of his city. The surface presentation of spiritedness and spirited men in the Republic is that they are easily educable and can become the foundation of the good city. This is a necessary presupposition of the good city. But beneath that surface runs a current which shows that spiritedness is a most problematic element of the soul and the city, and that the good city is hence most improbable.Spiritedness first appeared in the city as the means to protect its stolen acquisitions. And this is a key to the nature of spiritedness: it is very much connected with the defense of one’s own.Anger is unreasoning and can easily mistake its sense of injustice for the fact of injustice. Anger is always self-righteous; it is at the root of moral indignation, but moral indignation is a dangerous and, although necessary, often unreasonable and even immoral passion. The tendency of anger is to give the color of reason and morality to selfishness. This has been revealed by the only character in the dialogue who has expressed anger; Thrasymachus’ anger defends the city’s own against philosophy when philosophy threatens the city’s injustice. Spiritedness is the only element in the city or man which by its very nature is hostile to philosophy.Philosophy leads to lack of concern with one’s own; it is concerned with things that are not threatened, that exist always. The activity of philosophy—the soul’s contemplation of the principles of all things—brings with it a pleasure of a purity and intensity that causes all other pleasures to pale. Philosophers need not live according to myths which assure the permanence and significance of things which are not permanent or significant. Death is overcome by a lack of concern with one’s individual fate, by forgetting it, in the contemplation of eternity.(392c-403c)Poets must appeal to and flatter the dominant passions of the spectators. Those passions are fear, pity, and contempt. The spectators want to cry or to laugh.(403c-412b)In the city of sows, the harmony of public and private interest was insured by the simplicity of desire, natural plenty, and the skill of the arts. Once desire has been emancipated, the virtue of moderation—understood as the control of spiritedness as well as desire—is used to re-establish that harmony.(412b-416d)In the Socratic view, political justice requires that unequal men receive unequal honors and unequal shares in ruling.All unjust conventional inequalities must be overcome without abandoning the respect for the inequality constituted by differences in virtue. The difficulty, of course, stems from private interest and property. The more powerful always want to have more, and the weaker are willing to settle for equality. It is not easy to make men without virtues see and accept their inferiority and give up hopes of rising. Reason and sentiment demand a solution by means of which men get what they deserve. But in all actual regimes there are one of two practical solutions: there is a hierarchy, but one that mixes nature with convention by making ruling depend on some more easily recognized and accepted title than virtue; or there is no standard or hierarchy at all. Each solution reflects a part of the truth, but each is incomplete.The lie, because it is a lie, points up the problems it is designed to solve. In any event, the character of men’s desires would make it impossible for a rational teaching to be the public teaching. Today it is generally admitted that every society is based on myths, myths which render acceptable the particular form of justice incorporated in the system. Socrates speaks more directly: the myths are lies.The noble lie is precisely an attempt to rationalize the justice of civil society; it is an essential part of an attempt to elaborate a regime which most embodies the principles of natural justice and hence transcends the false justice of other regimes. The thoughtful observer will find that the noble lie is a political expression of truths which it itself leads him to consider. In other words, there are good reasons for every part of this lie, and that is why a rational man would be willing to tell it.The Socratic teaching that a good society requires a fundamental falsehood is the direct opposite of that of the Enlightenment which argued that civil society could dispense with lies and count on selfish calculation to make men loyal to it. The difference between the two views can be reduced to a difference concerning the importance of moderation, both for the preservation of civil society and for the full development of individual men’s natures. The noble lie is designed to give men grounds for resisting, in the name of the common good, their powerful desires. The great thinkers of the Enlightenment did not deny that such lies are necessary to induce men to sacrifice their desires and to care for the common good. They were no more hopeful than Socrates concerning most men’s natural capacity to overcome their inclinations and devote themselves to the public welfare. What they insisted was that it was possible to build a civil society in which men did not have to care for the common good, in which desire would be channeled rather than controlled. A civil society which provided security and some prospect of each man’s acquiring those possessions he most wishes would be both a more simple and more sure solution than any utopian attempt to make men abandon their selfish wishes. Such a civil society could count on men’s rational adhesion, for it would be an instrument in procuring their own good as they see it. Therefore moderation of the appetites would be not only unnecessary but undesirable, for it would render a man more independent of the regime whose purpose it is to satisfy the appetites.The Socratic response to this argument would be twofold. First, he would simply deny the possibility of a regime which would never be compelled to call for real sacrifices from its citizens. This is particularly true in time of war. Second, such a civil society can be founded only by changing the meaning of rationality. For this society, rationality consists in the discovery of the best means of satisfying desires. The irrationality of those desires must be neglected; in particular, men must neglect the irrationality of their unwillingness to face the fact that they must die, of their constant search for the means of self-preservation as if they could live forever.(419c-427c)The guardian who is totally devoted to the common good is the prototype of the philosopher who is devoted to knowing the good.In relation to its neighbors, the city is not motivated by considerations of justice but by those of preservation. Justice has to do with the domestic life of the city and cannot be extended beyond its borders. This is a point to be considered when examining the analogy between city and man: justice is supposed to be the same in both, so one would expect that a man should behave toward other men as does a city toward other cities.Adeimantus’ particular form of spiritedness, when tamed, is a scourge of injustice, a source of primitive justice.(427c-445e)Justice, in the city at least, means only the presence of the three other virtues: moderation, courage, and wisdom. 第8-9卷 (543a-569c) The regime is identical with the class, or kind, of men who hold the ruling offices. As this class varies, so does the way of life of the city. The regime determines the character of law, education, property, marriage, and the family. The different kinds of regime are distinguished by their explicit goals, which derive from the ways of life men can choose. Truly different re... 2019-03-15 10:53  2人喜欢 第8-9卷(543a-569c)The regime is identical with the class, or kind, of men who hold the ruling offices. As this class varies, so does the way of life of the city. The regime determines the character of law, education, property, marriage, and the family.The different kinds of regime are distinguished by their explicit goals, which derive from the ways of life men can choose. Truly different regimes, and men, stem from significant and irreducible differences of principle. Socrates suggests that wisdom, honor, money, freedom, and love are the ends which men pursue and for which they can use the political order; the dominance of one principle or another brings forth very different dimensions in the lives of men. The healthy soul is the standard for the judgment of regimes and the key to understanding them; the healthy regime is the one that allows for the development of healthy souls. Such a political science is more akin to medicine than to mathematics. Political science must be evaluative; just as a doctor must know what a healthy body is, a political scientist must know what a healthy regime is. Such a political science provides a much richer and more comprehensive framework than that provided by our contemporary political science with its oversimplified dichotomies, democratic versus totalitarian or developed versus underdeveloped.Socrates presents political life in this way with the intention of benefiting Glaucon and Adeimantus. He is in the process of leading them back to the level of ordinary political life after their brief ascent toward the sun. They must live in the city, as must most men. But Socrates wishes them to see the city in the light of what they have learned in their ascent; their vision of their world must be transformed. Adeimantus must no longer see philosophy as an enemy of the city, and Glaucon must no longer be tempted by tyranny. Socrates accomplishes this by taking the highest kind of individual and constructing a regime around him. He thus appeals to Adeimantus, by giving political status to that human type, and to Glaucon, by showing him a ruler for whom the practice of justice appears to be an unqualified good. The young man who wishes to live well will pray for that city and its way of life. But this ultimately means that he will, in the absence of that regime, desire to live a private life, for that good life is shown to be possible without the regime; it does not depend, as do the other ways of life, on ruling in the city. It is self-sufficient and always available to him who chooses it. Socrates’ political science, paradoxically, is meant to show the superiority of the private life. The most important point made in this section is that while the best city exists only in myth, the best man exists actually.Glaucon, in his first speech on justice, asserted that a thing could be understood by its origin, or that its origin is its nature. Socrates taught, in the discussion of the ideas, that the end, not the origin, of a thing is its nature.The preoccupation with the acquisition of property and the difficulties involved in its distribution make it impossible for the city to devote itself to the good use of that property or, simply, to the good life. The body cannot be forgotten, and thus it is impossible to renounce everything connected with private property and concentrate only on the soul. The possession of private property is the crucial change from the best regime to the second best, and all the ills which beset the various regimes follow from that change. The city’s primary business becomes the management of property and is, hence, the dedication to mere life.(571a-592b)It will be noted that Socrates makes the choice between tyranny and philosophy depend on pleasure.This choice between the philosophic and tyrannic lives explains the plot of the Republic. Socrates takes a young man tempted by the tyrannic life and attempts to give him at least that modicum of awareness of philosophy which will cure him of the lust for tyranny. Any other exhortation would amount to empty moralism.In the Republic Socrates has included both god and beast in the city, and this accounts for the difference between his political science and Aristotle’s. Socrates, unlike Aristotle, makes eros a political principle. Although tyranny and the tyrannic man are in one way the furthest from philosophy, they are in another the nearest to it. This is why Socrates is attracted to those dangerous young men, the potential tyrants, who are products of the democracy. With some of these young men (for example, Critias and Alcibiades) his training failed, and as a result he was condemned. But with others (for example, Xenophon and Plato) he succeeded, and they have exculpated him.It is clear that happiness does not depend on anything tyranny can acquire. Glaucon’s notion of the good things has been altered by the marvelous things he has experienced in this conversation. Previously he thought that both just and unjust man desired the same things; now he sees the possibility of a life—the life of Socrates—which is self-sufficient and happy. The needfulness of tyranny has become questionable, and Glaucon will never again be able to pose the problem as he once did. Happiness is not connected with the exploitation of other human beings. At last man can break from the earthly city, and Glaucon has gained an inner freedom from its claims and its charms.第10卷(595a-608b)Poetry is necessary to Socrates’ project of reforming Glaucon, but it must be a new kind of poetry, one which can sustain Glaucon in a life of moral virtue and respect for philosophy. It is not, then, that poetry must be entirely banished but that it must be reformed.The text for Republic, Book X, is Odyssey, Book XI, the account of Odysseus’ visit to the dead. The difference between Odysseus’ experiences among the dead and those of Er is an indication of what Socrates is trying to teach. Er found rewards and punishments for just and unjust souls; but, more important, he also found an order of the universe which makes this world intelligible and provides a ground for the contemplative life. At the source of all things, Er saw that soul is the first principle of the cosmic order; hence the proper study of the universe is the study of the soul. What is best in man is not in conflict but in harmony with the nature of things.Socrates outlines a new kind of poetry which leads beyond itself, which does not present man’s only alternatives as tragic or comic, which supports the philosophic life. He gives the principle which Aristotle developed in the Poetics, and which is embodied in the works of men such as Dante and Shakespeare. It is still poetry, but poetry which points beyond itself.Poetry is essentially comprehensive or synoptic, and this distinguishes it from the special arts. The poem is a collection of imitations, but it is informed by the vision of the poet, a vision that transcends the level of the special arts.The ordinary standards for judgment of the worth of an activity or depth of wisdom are not applicable to Homer or himself. Wisdom has another source than art, and there is another kind of relation to the ideas than that of the artisan. A wise man is judged, not by any deed that he performs, but by the quality of his knowledge. And that knowledge is not like that of the artisan who produces something which can be used and who deals with a special subject matter. Wisdom is sought for its own sake, and it is comprehensive, interrelating the various arts and their products. Both Homer and Socrates in some way possess this kind of knowledge; they both have a view of the whole. Homer produces a product as the artisans do, but that product is distinguished from the artisans’ products in that it reflects a view of the whole, and its maker is by his very nature a man who must reflect on the whole.What Socrates implicitly criticizes Homer for is that he cannot explain the grounds for that view of the whole or for the way of life devoted to knowing it. Homer appears as a celebrator of heroes, of men of action, and hence as their inferior. Speech seems to be subordinate to deed. Nothing in the Homeric poems indicates the dignity of the poet; there are no heroes who give an account of the poet’s own doings, nor is there a picture of a universe which makes it possible to comprehend the possibility of wisdom. Socrates accuses Homer of not reflecting on himself, and hence making a world in which there is no place for himself.Only the legislator oversees the whole; and by looking to the legislator, the artisans know what the purpose or end of their products is. There is no idea which the legislator can look to and imitate mechanically; his art comprises wisdom entire. The user’s art is political science, of which Socrates is the founder.What Socrates stresses is that there is nothing in the poet’s art which impels him to the discovery of what is truly natural and much that inclines him to serve convention. Poetry tends to blend the natural and conventional elements in things; and it charms men in such a way that they no longer see the seams of the union of these two elements.Homer knows only that part of nature which causes men to laugh or cry, the part that makes human life appear either ridiculous or miserable. The man overwhelmed by pity and fear is the man least of all able to forget himself and his own, and hence the things that will protect him and give his life meaning. Most of all, he looks to the laws and the gods, and his pity can well make him a fanatic. The natural passions of men which Homer knows and appeals to are those that most attach a man to convention and hence to bondage in the cave. And the Homeric gods are such as to encourage and satisfy the pitying part of man’s soul.The overcoming of the attachment to one’s own is a monstrous endeavor, and the passions served by poetry rebel against it; but that endeavor is necessary to philosophy. This, then, is the essence of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry. Socrates banishes poetry once more, but this time offers it a return if it can learn to argue, to justify itself before the bar of philosophy. He points the way to Aristotle’s understanding of tragedy as a purgation of the passions of pity and fear rather than their satisfaction. Such tragedy would prepare a man to be reasonable and moderate after having purged those terrible passions; it would pay due attention to man’s necessary love of his own, but would temper it in such a way as to allow him some freedom from it. Thus tragedy would neither give way to these passions nor deny their existence. It would then be an important part of the education of decent, unfanatic men. Poetry will return, but only after having learned to subordinate itself, to mitigate its unguided tendencies toward indulgence and fanaticism. When the poets depict the gods they must no longer look to laughter and pity but to the ideas.(608c-621d)The most characteristic part of Socrates’ teaching is that soul is irreducible and that it is somehow the principle of the cosmos.The Republic, which seems to give a completed teaching about politics and the soul, ends with a return to philosophic doubt, to the conviction that one’s opinions are open to unanswered, if not unanswerable, questions.The myth of Er also makes clear that the civic virtues do not suffice for a man’s salvation for all eternity, and that, unless he has philosophized on earth, this voyage will profit him nothing. For each man must choose a new life, and that new life will determine whether he will fare well or ill in his next thousand-year sojourn among the dead; the correct choice of a life depends on knowledge of the soul, not on the practice of moral virtue. Those who have been rewarded for moral virtue in the afterlife are less well prepared than are those who have been punished to make the proper choice of life. We see a decent man, one like Cephalus, who has just come from his rewards, choose a tyrant’s life; for only law and convention had kept him in bounds in his earlier life, and his real view of happiness led him to envy tyrants. He has learned nothing in the afterlife; there is apparently no philosophy in the afterlife for those who did not practice it on earth; the soul is not perfected by the separation from the body. For all men other than the philosopher, there is a constant change of fortune from happiness to misery and back. The myth attributes full responsibility to men for what happens to them and thus teaches that there is no sin but ignorance.The teaching of this myth is a strictly human one—man in this life, without being other worldly—can attain self-sufficient happiness in the exercise of his natural powers and only in this way will he partake of eternity to the extent a human being can do so. Otherwise stated, only the philosopher has no need of the myth. (449a-473c) Women, family, and philosophy are all of the domain of the erotic, which seems to be what is most intransigently private. If the perfection of the city cannot comprehend the perfection of the soul, the city will look ugly in comparison to the soul’s beauty and be a proper subject of comedy; its pretensions will be ludicrous. This is part of Socrates’ attempt to politicize the erot... 2019-03-15 09:50  1人喜欢 (449a-473c) Women, family, and philosophy are all of the domain of the erotic, which seems to be what is most intransigently private.If the perfection of the city cannot comprehend the perfection of the soul, the city will look ugly in comparison to the soul’s beauty and be a proper subject of comedy; its pretensions will be ludicrous.This is part of Socrates’ attempt to politicize the erotic, to act as though it made no demands that cannot conform to the public life of the city. Shame is an essential component of the erotic relations between men and women. The need for overcoming shame becomes clear in relation to what Socrates considers to be another form of eros—intellectual or philosophic eros. Souls, in order to know, must strip away the conventions which cover their nature. Shame prevents them from doing this just as it prevents them from stripping their bodies.The character of the women in a society has a great deal to do with the character of the men; for when the men are young, the women have a great deal to do with their rearing, and when they are older, they must please the women. In particular, women have a more powerful attachment to the home and the children than do men. They are involved with the private things which are likely to oppose the city. They characteristically do not like to send their sons off to war. Further, women have much to do with men’s desire to possess money. Women’s favor can be won by gifts, and they have a taste for adornment and public display. Women play a great role in the corruption of regimes, as will be shown in Books VIII and IX. If half the city is not educated to the city’s virtues, the city will not subsist. This is a city without homes, and the women have more to overcome if they are to accept it, for their natures lead them to love the private things most and draw the men to a similar love. They must share the men’s tastes, or they will resist the changes in the family Socrates is about to propose.He compares the city to a body all parts of which share the same pleasures and pains. This city does not attain to that degree of unity, however, for one thing cannot be made public: the body. Everyone’s body is his own. The minds could conceivably be made to think similar. But if a man stubs his toe, no other man can share his pain. Thus the unity of the city depends on that same forgetting of the body which has been a golden thread running through the whole discourse. The body is what stands in the way of devotion to the common good; it is the source of the desire and the need for privacy.Philosophy is essentially a private activity and that the city must always be ruled by prejudices. Moreover, from the example of the city in speech, a man would learn what he must overcome in himself in order to become a philosopher. Socrates forgets the body in order to make clear its importance.If philosophy is desirable, so are these efforts to conquer everything that attaches one to particularity. Socrates can contemplate going naked where others go clothed; he is not afraid of ridicule. He can also contemplate sexual intercourse where others are stricken with terror; he is not afraid of moral indignation. In other words, he treats the comic seriously and the tragic lightly. He can smile where others cry and remain earnest where others laugh. In the Symposium he says that the true poet must be both tragedian and comedian, implying that the true poet is the philosopher. Here he shows that the man who has both gifts must use them to oppose the ways the vulgar tragic and comic poets use them; he must treat the tragic lightly and the comic seriously, hence reversing their usual roles. The man who is able to do this is already a philosopher. In both cases, it is shame which must be opposed; for shame is the wall built by convention which stands between the mind and the light. The ordinary poetry appeals to that shame, accepting its edicts as law, while philosophic poetry overcomes it. Shame, in both the case of nakedness and that of incest, is spiritedness’ means of controlling eros for the sake of preservation and the city. The effect of that shame is pervasive and subtle, making the thinkable appear unthinkable. The mind requires heroic efforts in order to become aware of the distortions of its vision caused by shame and to overcome them.(473c-487a)Beginning from the common sense of political men and maintaining their perspective throughout, Socrates demonstrates that they must tolerate and encourage philosophy. This constitutes a defense of philosophy from the political point of view. Philosophy is necessary to this regime, to the best regime, because without philosophy the regime cannot find impartial rulers who have considered the proper distribution of the good things. In other words, the philosopher is the only kind of knower whose attention is devoted to the whole. Statesmen are always preoccupied with the here-and-now, but the interpretation of the here-and-now depends on some knowledge of the whole. If justice means giving each man what is fitting for him, a statesman must know what man is and his relation to the other beings.Socrates teaches that wisdom and political power are distinct. Their coming together can only be due to the coincidence that a man who is wise happens also to be a ruler, thus uniting the two things; nothing in their two natures leads the one to the other. Political power serves the passions or desires of the members of a city, and a multitude cannot philosophize. It may use the results of science or philosophy, but it will use them to its own ends and will thereby distort them. Moreover, the wise man by himself is more of a threat to a regime than a helper. Intellectual progress is not the same as political progress, and, because there is not a simple harmony between the works of the mind and the works of the city, the philosopher without power must remain in an uneasy relationship with the city and its beliefs. Enlightenment endangers philosophy because it tempts philosophers to sacrifice their quest for the truth in favor of attempting to edify the public; in an “enlightened” world, philosophy risks being made a tool of unwise and even tyrannical regimes, thus giving those regimes the color of reason and losing its function as the standard for criticism of them. Enlightenment also endangers the city by publicly calling into question its untrue but essential beliefs.The philosopher learns as other men love—simply because it seems good and an end in itself; as a matter of fact, learning is an erotic activity for him. Love of learning is another expression of man’s eros, of his longing for completeness. Such a man wants to know everything, aware that no part can be understood without being considered in relation to the whole. Socrates simply describes that rare but revealing phenomenon, the theoretical man, he who proves the possibility of disinterested knowledge. He is the man who can preserve his disinterestedness even in the difficult human questions which concern him most immediately, because he is more attracted by clarity than life, satisfaction of desire, or honor. The philosopher introduces to the city a dimension of reason that had not been discerned in the earlier discussion of it.Socrates defines the second salient characteristic of the philosopher: he is a lover of the one idea of each thing and not the many things which participate in the ideas, of being and not becoming, of knowledge and not opinion.The ideas are the permanent ones behind the changing manys to which we apply the same name. Thus they are the causes of the things seen and heard—causes not in the sense that they explain the coming-into-being of a particular thing but in the sense that they explain its character. The idea of man is the cause of a particular man’s being a man rather than a collection of the elements to which he can be reduced. The ideas, then, are the justification of the philosophic life. If there are no permanent entities, if everything is in flux, there can be no knowledge.In undertaking to look for justice, Socrates and his companions were looking for something real, which has a higher dignity than, and can act as a standard for, the imperfect justice which they found in men and cities. If there is not something like an idea of justice, their quest is futile.And it is in this quest for the universal principles that the theoretical man first meets the opposition of the unphilosophic men who make up a city. Unphilosophic men are loyal not to cities in general but to their own city; they love not men in general, but this particular man or woman; they are not interested in the nature of the species, but their own fates. However, all the things to which citizens are most passionately attached have a lessened reality in the eyes of the theoretical man; what is peculiar to these things, what constitutes their charm for the practical man, must be overcome in order to understand them. For the practical man the particular things to which he is attached are the real things, and he will resist any attempt to go beyond them to “the more general case,” which would destroy their character and his capacity to possess them as his very own. The city in speech of the philosopher comes into being only by depreciating Athens, and any other city in which men can live. To the philosopher the city in speech is more lovable and more real than any of the particular cities which are to him poor imitations of the city in speech. In order to love what is, he must be a man who does not have the same needs as other men; he must have overcome, at least in thought, his own becoming. For the theoretical man, particular things are real only insofar as they “participate” in the ideas. They are not but are like what is. Hence the practical men who love particular things make the mistake of taking a thing to be that which it is like. They thus dream their lives away, never laying hold of a reality. But they cannot be told this. They must be soothed and deceived, and it is questionable how far they can afford to be tolerant of the philosopher whose interests are so different and conflicting.Poetry, in its most common usage, adorns the particular and renders it more attractive, hence making it more difficult to transcend. It does so because it must appeal to audiences of men who cannot and do not wish to make that transcendence. It is thus an opponent of philosophy.The virtues connected with the city help to preserve the city and thereby its inhabitants; preservation, or mere life, is the goal. The virtues connected with philosophy aid in the quest for the comprehensive truth; the good life is the goal. Both goals make their demands, and those demands conflict. There are, then, two kinds of virtue: philosophic virtue and demotic, or vulgar, virtue.(503b-540c)Socrates introduces the new theme when he tells Adeimantus that the study of justice, far from being the most important subject, is worthless unless it is completed by another. The true science, to which the others are only ministerial, is the study of the good. This comes as a surprise to Adeimantus, who is totally devoted to the city. It is a step beyond the earlier recognition that the idea of justice transcends any possible city. In turn, the idea of justice is only one of many ideas, which are treated in the comprehensive study of the good.The erotic Glaucon is told that eros is the soul’s longing for completeness, to be full of being, to know everything which is. Philosophy, which was introduced as a means to actualize the city’s good and is being used as a means to discover the good, turns out to be the end, the human good.Why does Socrates insist that our situation is that of men who mistake images for realities? It would seem more sensible to say that we take objects too seriously, that we do not recognize the importance and superior reality of the causes or first principles. How can it be said that we are bound to the lowest level of the line? The answer seems to be that the cave is the city and that our attachment to the city binds us to certain authoritative opinions about things. We do not see men as they are but as they are represented to us by legislators and poets. A Greek sees things differently from the way a Persian sees them. One need only think of the question of nakedness as discussed in Book V, or the significance of cows to Hindus as opposed to other men, to realize how powerful are the various horizons constituted by law or convention. Legislators and poets are the makers of these horizons; or, to use the symbols of the cave image, they are the men who carry the statues and the other things the reflections of which the prisoners see. These objects are not natural; they are themselves images of natural objects produced with cunning art so as to look like their originals, but are adapted to serve the special interests of the artists. In other words, we do not see things directly, but through the opinions we are taught about them. Those opinions are not accurate reflections of nature but are adapted to serve the needs of the city. They are designed to make a man love his city, and therefore they have to invest the city with all sorts of special significance and have no basis in nature. The first and most difficult of tasks is the separation of what exists by nature from what is merely made by man.The divided line and the cave teach that there are two fatal temptations of the mind. The first is that of the men who insist on the significance of the images in the cave and constitute themselves as their defenders and hence the accusers of the philosophers. They are often men of very high intelligence who are forced to hate reason by their unwillingness to renounce the charm and significance of their particular experiences and those of their people. They are enemies of whatever leads in the direction of universality, of anything that would tend to break down the heterogeneity, the particularity and distinctiveness, of the ways to which they are attached. Their dominant trait is piety, which frequently turns into fanaticism. These men are among the leaders of peoples and are protectors of the people’s beliefs. This account of their nature acts as a corrective of the view that the people can easily be persuaded to accept philosophers as kings.The other great temptation is that of those who are too easily liberated and do not learn in the cave what must be learned about man and the soul. These men dwell on the third level of the line and are best represented by the mathematicians. They escape to a world of universality and are charmed by the competence of their reason to order and explain that world. The homogeneity of numbers which can apply to all things permits them to reduce all the particularities in the world to unities. They tend to forget the questionableness of their own beginnings or principles and the natural heterogeneity of the different kinds of things; they are forgetful of qualitative differences and, hence, of the ideas. As the pious men were hostile to the ideas because the ideas threatened the heterogeneity of their world, these competent men are hostile to the ideas because they threaten the homogeneity of their world. Such were the early philosophers who while watching the sky fell into holes, the men ridiculed by Aristophanes because their science could not understand man, the only being who understands. These two temptations are aided by two of man’s most noble arts: poetry and mathematics. Both of these arts are necessary and useful, but both tend to emancipate themselves from philosophy and re-enforce the hostility to it. Dialectic, the art of friendly conversation, as practiced by Socrates, is this combination of daring and moderation.In the decisive respect the city is not natural: it cannot comprehend the highest activity of man. In the light of the splendor of the soul’s yearning after the whole, the city looks very ugly. This is the true comedy-taking the city with infinite seriousness, beautifying it with every artifice, making it a veritable Callipolis, and then finding that compared to the soul which was supposed to be like it, it is a thing to be despised. This fair city, the goal of so many aspirations, now looks like a cave, and its happy citizens like prisoners; it is comparable to the Hades of which Achilles complained, and the attachment to it is a species of folly. From the point of view of the city, the philosopher looks ridiculous; but from the point of view of the whole, the citizen looks ridiculous.What then was the use of spending so much time and effort on a city that is impossible? Precisely to show its impossibility. This was not just any city, but one constructed to meet all the demands of justice. Its impossibility demonstrates the impossibility of the actualization of a just regime and hence moderates the moral indignation a man might experience at the sight of less-than-perfect regimes. The extreme spirit of reform or revolution loses its ground if its end is questionable. If the infinite longing for justice on earth is merely a dream or a prayer, the shedding of blood in its name turns from idealism into criminality. The revolutions of Communism or Fascism are made in the name of perfect regimes which are to be their consequence. What matter if a few million die now, if one is sure that countless generations of mankind will enjoy the fruits of justice? Socrates thinks about the end which is ultimately aimed at by all reformers or revolutionaries but to which they do not pay sufficient attention. He shows what a regime would have to be in order to be just and why such a regime is impossible. Regimes can be improved but not perfected; injustice will always remain. The proper spirit of reform, then, is moderation. Socrates constructs his utopia to point up the dangers of what we would call utopianism; as such it is the greatest critique of political idealism ever written. The Republic serves to moderate the extreme passion for political justice by showing the limits of what can be demanded and expected of the city; and, at the same time, it shows the direction in which the immoderate desires can be meaningfully channeled. At the beginning of the dialogue, Glaucon and Adeimantus set the severest standards for political justice. In order to try to meet those standards, they would have to establish a terrible tyranny and would fail nevertheless. Socrates leads them first to the fulfillment of their wishes, and then beyond, to a fullfillment which does not depend on the transformation of human nature. The striving for the perfectly just city puts unreasonable and despotic demands on ordinary men, and it abuses and misuses the best men. There is gentleness in Socrates’ treatment of men, and his vision is never clouded by the blackness of moral indignation, for he knows what to expect of men. Political idealism is the most destructive of human passions.The thinkers of the Enlightenment, culminating in Marx, preserved Socrates’ ultimate goals but forgot his insistence that nature made them impossible for men at large. Only by distorting or narrowing man’s horizon can the permanent duality in his nature be overcome.In the case of most citizens, the philosopher’s concern is only that he do them no harm, and his justice thus has the character of a burdensome duty. In the case of the promising young, he is concerned with doing them a positive good, and his justice has the character of love. A philosopher must always carry on a contest with the city for the affections of its sons. Although he has a duty to the city, he is always at war with it. 导论 The Republic is the true Apology of Socrates, for only in the Republic does he give an adequate treatment of the theme which was forced on him by Athens’ accusation against him. That theme is the relationship of the philosopher to the political community. Socrates is unjust not only because he breaks Athens’ laws but also because he apparently does not accept those fundamental beliefs wh... 2019-03-14 15:42  1人喜欢 导论The Republic is the true Apology of Socrates, for only in the Republic does he give an adequate treatment of the theme which was forced on him by Athens’ accusation against him. That theme is the relationship of the philosopher to the political community. Socrates is unjust not only because he breaks Athens’ laws but also because he apparently does not accept those fundamental beliefs which make civil society possible.We are likely to be misled by this apparent Socratic optimism concerning the best case—the regime where philosophers rule. Careful reading will reveal that this alleged harmony is more of a paradox than a solution, that it covers a host of tensions which come to light in the less than perfect cases. Socrates may well have reformed philosophy so that it was no longer indifferent to politics, but it was certainly no less subversive of all existing regimes than was the older philosophy. If philosophers are the natural rulers, they are the rivals of all the actual rulers. In fact, the Republic tacitly admits the truth of the charges made against Socrates: he is not orthodox in his beliefs about the gods and sets up new beings, the ideas, which are superior to the gods; the philosophers he trains will be men who both know the nature of things in the air and below the earth and are able to speak with consummate skill; and he teaches young men to despise Athens because he teaches them to love a regime in which philosophers are kings. Socrates denies that he is unjust because of this, but there must be a revolution in men’s understanding of justice for just deeds to be recognized as such. In all imperfect regimes, his presence is problematic, and he must behave prudently: he undermines the attachment to the regime and laws of the city, but he is the salvation of all those in it who wish to live the good life.The Republic is the first book which brings philosophy “down into the cities”; and we watch in it the foundation of political science, the only discipline which can bring the blessings of reason to the city. We will learn that the establishment of political science cannot be carried out without sacrifice of the dearest convictions and interests of most men; these sacrifices are so great that to many they do not seem worthwhile: one of the most civilized cities which has ever existed thought it better to sacrifice philosophy in the person of Socrates rather than face the alternative he presented. This is why philosophy needs an apology; it is a dangerous and essentially questionable activity. Socrates knew that his interests were not, and could not be, the interests of most men and their cities. We frequently do not see this and assume that his execution was a result of the blind prejudices of the past. Therefore we do not see the true radicalness of the philosophic life. Hostility to philosophy is the natural condition of man and the city.第一卷(327a-328b)Socrates will only give as much of himself as is required to regain his freedom. This situation is a paradigm of the relation of the philosopher to the city.Polemarchus sees him hurrying off and orders a slave to order him to stay. This little scene prefigures the three-class structure of the good regime developed in the Republic and outlines the whole political problem. Power is in the hands of the gentlemen, who are not philosophers. They can command the services of the many, and their strength is such that they always hold the philosophers in their grasp. Therefore it is part of the philosophers’ self-interest to come to terms with them. The question becomes: to what extent can the philosophers influence the gentlemen? It is this crucial middle class which is the primary object of the Republic and the education prescribed in it. In this episode, the first fact is brute force, leading to the recognition that no matter how reasonable one may be, everything depends upon the people’s willingness to listen. There is a confrontation here between wisdom, as represented by Socrates, and power, as represented by Polemarchus and his friends. At first the opposition of the two principles is complete, but Adeimantus and Polemarchus try to make Socrates choose to remain by offering him pleasant occupations if he does so. Glaucon accepts on behalf of his friend, and Socrates grudgingly gives in to the fait accompli. Hence wisdom and power reach a compromise, and a miniature community is formed. This accomplished, they take a vote and ratify their decision, and a new principle of rule emerges: consent. It is a mixture of powerless wisdom and unwise power. All political life will be founded on such compromises, more or less satisfactory, until the means can be discovered to permit the absolute rule of wisdom. Since he is forced to become a member of this community, Socrates soon establishes himself as its ruler by overcoming the other aspirants to the office, and then he proceeds to found a political regime in which philosophers will rule.(328b-331d)Having made their social contract, the members of the group go to Polemarchus’ house where they find his father, Cephalus, who dominates the scene, and who does so precisely because he is the father. Age is his title to rule, as it is in almost all regimes governed by ancestral custom. Age is a practical substitute for wisdom because, unlike wisdom, it is politically recognizable and easily defined. It is more feasible to teach force to respect age than to teach it to respect wisdom. The reverence for age, and hence antiquity, is one of the strongest ties which can bind a civil society together. But in order to carry on a frank discussion about justice, this reverence must be overcome, and the philosopher must take the place of the father at the center of the circle. Socrates must induce Cephalus to leave the scene, because Cephalus is beyond reason, and it would be impious to dispute him.Once authority has been banished, Socrates and his companions can begin a critical examination of the ancestral code, of the conventional view of justice. This is the burden of the rest of Book I. All traditional opinions are discredited; and unaided reason, free of limiting prejudices, can begin the search for an understanding of justice which is not merely opinion. This criticism is a destructive activity in the name of liberation. It is a perilous undertaking for men who must remain members of civil society and could not properly take place under the eyes of Cephalus. He stands for those restraints on body and soul which are essential to the preservation of the city. There are certain uncomfortable issues, the raising of which usually indicates an inclination to vice on the part of those who do so. The practice of posing the extreme questions is a bad one, for one of its necessary consequences is corruption of the habits of the virtues. The only justification for questioning the old way would be that as a result a new, superior, way which Cephalus does not know of might emerge. The ancestral is by its nature silent about its own foundations; it is an imposing presence that awes those who might be tempted to look too closely.Cephalus typifies the ancestral which cannot, but must, be questioned. Although his appearance is brief, by means of a few circumspect inquiries Socrates manages to reveal his character and his principles and, hence, those of the tradition he represents. Then the old man is delicately set aside. From the point of view of justice, eros is a terrible thing, a savage beast. For a man like Cephalus, life is always split between sinning and repenting. Only by the death of eros and its charms can such a gentleman become fully reliable, for his eros leads neither to justice nor philosophy but to intense, private bodily satisfaction. Characteristic of Cephalus and men like him is a salutary forgetting of the preconditions of their kind of life.Socrates’ procedure is quite strange. In the first place he says nothing about half of what interests Cephalus: he does not mention piety, whether this is because he thinks Cephalus’ understanding of piety is adequate or because he is not interested in piety. Second, in his discussion of paying one’s debts, Socrates is silent about the gods and the sacrifices owed to them. In a word, Socrates forgets the divine, which is Cephalus’ prime preoccupation, and makes the discussion one concerning human justice alone. This, along with his unwillingness to face the fact that he might be ignorant of the very obligations he is trying so hard to meet, is what causes Cephalus to leave. While the discussion is going on, he is elsewhere performing sacrifices to the gods, concerned with what is forgotten in that discussion.It becomes Polemarchus’ responsibility to explain what standard should be looked to when one deviates from the letter of the law—which is equivalent to stating the purpose for which laws are instituted.(331d-336a)The relation between justice conceived as one’s own good and justice conceived as the common good is the abiding concern of the Republic; Cephalus and Polemarchus represent the two poles. Also at this point, with the recognition that a man’s property in money only extends so far as he can use that money well—only so far as is good for him—private property becomes radically questionable.Every nation has wars and must defend itself; it can only do so if it has citizens who care for it and are willing to kill the citizens of other nations. If the distinction between friends and enemies, and the inclination to help the former and harm the latter, were obliterated from the heart and mind of man, political life would be impossible. This is the necessary political definition of justice, and it produces its specific kind of human nobility expressed in the virtue of the citizen. Socrates does not simply reject it as he appears to do. The warriors in his best regime, whom he compares to noble dogs, share in the most salient characteristic of noble dogs: gentleness toward acquaintances and harshness toward strangers. This is the key to the strengths and weaknesses of the political man.Socrates and Polemarchus discover that the world is divided up among the arts and there is nothing left for an art of justice. A doctor may do good to his friends and hence be just, but justice is nothing beyond the exercise of his art, which is something other than justice. Arts are the means of doing good and harm; arts have subject matters but justice does not; hence justice is not an art and cannot do good. Justice has disappeared. Moreover, Socrates insists on pointing out that the arts are neutral, that they can effect opposite results with equal ease. However that may be, the assumption that justice is an art does lead to serious difficulties, expressed ironically in the notion that the just man is both useless and a thief.The primary concern of the just man must be something Polemarchus has never considered: what counts is not so much the disposition to give the good things to friends, but knowing what those good things are. Justice must be some kind of knowledge. Justice necessarily and primarily demands a knowledge of what is good for man and the community; otherwise the knowledge and skills of the arts are in the service of authoritative myths.Artisans were content with their competence and closed to the larger questions. To be ignorant in Socrates’ way is to be open to the whole. The artisans are models of knowledge, but their kind of knowledge is not applicable to the domain of poets and statesmen. The problem is to combine the concerns of poets and statesmen with knowledge as artisans possess it. Such knowledge is what Socrates is seeking.The doctor can produce health, but that health is good he does not learn from medicine, and similarly with all of the arts. They deal with partial goods which presuppose a knowledge of the whole good to which they minister. The error of the discussion was to look for a specific subject matter for justice, to make it one among many arts, to act as though only the doctor had anything to say about medicine. To help a sick friend one needs not only a doctor but someone who knows to whom health is fitting and how many other goods should be sacrificed to it, and who can direct the doctor to do what will most help the patient. There are master arts which rule whole groups of ministerial arts and are necessary to them. These are what Aristotle calls architectonic arts. The carpenter, the mason, the roofer, etc.—all are in need of an architect if a house is to be produced. He is more important than they are, he guides them, and he does not need to be a carpenter, a mason, or a roofer himself. Without the architect, all the other arts connected with building lack an end and are useless or worse. Similarly, justice must be a master art, ruling the arts which produce partial goods so as to serve the whole good. In other words, justice must be knowledge of that good which none of the other arts knows but which each presupposes. Lawgivers actually organize all the arts and tell their practitioners what they can and cannot do. What Socrates proposes is a legislative or political science. If each of the artisans obeys the law established by a legislator who is wise in this science, he would be just, and justice would take care of itself in law-abiding practice of the arts. In this way the arts would provide what is fitting to each man. Hence Socrates teaches that in order to be just in the full sense one must be a philosopher, and that philosophy is necessary to justice.The poets and the laws tell Polemarchus the proper place of each thing, and this is why he sees no difficulty in doing good to friends. His is a prephilosophic world, and its authorities must be completely discredited before philosophy can even be sought. Polemarchus’ view is not merely a result of his laziness but a product of his attachment to family and city. He makes the primitive identification of the good with his own. Men who are outsiders can become friends only by becoming “naturalized” members of the family; blood ties are what count. Even the loyalty to the city is understood as an extension of the family. This tendency to see the good in one’s own and to devote oneself to it is one of the most powerful urges of human nature and the source of great devotion and energy. Once the distinction between what is good and one’s own is made, the principle of loyalty to family and city is undermined. In order to be just, one must seek good men wherever they may be, even in nations fighting one’s own nation. If the good must be pursued, then caring for one’s own must be extinguished, or it will make one unjust and impede the quest for the good. This undermines family and city; and they must attempt to prevent the distinction from even coming to light. Certainly, Polemarchus would regard the abandonment of his primary loyalties as the destruction of the purpose and dignity of his life. If, however, he is to be consistent with the argument, he must make this sacrifice. A man who wishes to be just must be cosmopolitan. Thus far, Socrates has led us to the observation that in order to do good to friends and harm to enemies one need only be a philosopher and give up one’s attachments to those whom most men call friends.With all of Polemarchus’ admiration for justice, it is not the highest thing, not sought for as such. Justice is more of a means to the end of preserving life and property than itself the end of a good life. Polemarchus’ definition of justice might be regarded as the rule requisite to the satisfaction of collective selfishness: be loyal to the members of your own group so that you can best take advantage of the outsiders. There is a tension in Polemarchus—of which he is unaware—be—tween his love of property and his love of justice. This is what Socrates exposes and what Thrasymachus is about to exploit.(336b-354b)Thrasymachus has stripped away the veils that covered the selfishness of the rulers and their laws. Those laws themselves serve the private interest of a part of the city and do harm to the rest of it. Laws are not directed to the common good. And yet the city will continue to put lawbreakers to death as unjust men and enemies of the common good. The anger awakened in men by the sight of indifference or hostility to law is a powerful force in protecting the law and hence the city, but it can also be the enemy of justice and is certainly the greatest enemy of philosophy. Thrasymachus, whose art gives speech to the passions of the city, is its agent in condemning Socrates, and his action in the service of this passion imitates the city’s action.When the poor, or the rich, or the old families, or a tyrant take over the rule in a city, its laws change correspondingly. The sovereign makes the laws, and those laws always happen to reflect its interests. Oligarchies make laws which favor and protect oligarchy; democracy makes laws which favor and protect democracy, etc. The regime is the absolute beginning point; there is nothing beyond it. To understand the kind of justice practiced in any city one must look to the regime. The laws have their source in the human, all too human. He who obeys them, in reverence or in fear, is simply serving the advantage of the stronger, whether the stronger is a single man, or the great majority of the people, or any other politically relevant group within the city. If this be the case, however, prudence and self-interest would seem to dictate to the individual that either he should try to evade the law or else become the lawmaker himself. Thrasymachus’ thesis is simply that the regime makes the laws and that the members of the regime look to their own good and not the common good. The city is not a unity but a composite of opposed parties, and the party which wins out over the others is the source of the law. There is no fundamental difference between tyranny and other regimes because they all have the same selfish end. Justice, therefore, is not a fundamental phenomenon; the lawgiver cannot base himself upon it, for justice is a result of law.Socrates does not deny that it is the stronger who rule and establish the law. He silently accepts the view that all existing regimes are as Thrasymachus says they are. The two men thus agree that the character of the ruling group is the core of politics, that the rulers are the stronger, and that justice is a political phenomenon and must be embodied in the laws of a city. The issue between them is whether all rulers, all lawgivers, must be selfish in the way Thrasymachus insists they are. From this point on the question is the regime—who rules; and Socrates tries to find a kind of man, a political class, which is both strong and public-spirited.Socrates turns, then, to the criticism of Thrasymachus’ view of the rulers. He quickly succeeds in embarrassing him by the reflection that sometimes rulers make mistakes; hence obedience to the law may be as much to their disadvantage as their advantage. Justice is not the advantage of the stronger unless the stronger (the rulers) know what their own advantage is. The emphasis now shifts from strength to knowledge.Like Polemarchus, Thrasymachus takes it for granted that the most common objects of desire—particularly whatever has to do wealth—are advantageous and that knowledge of them is a given. Thrasymachus is the more thoughtful voice of the most thoughtless opinions and desires. He wishes to educate a clever, selfish man who knows how to get what he wants.The city could hardly admit that its laws are essentially fallible. Its pronouncements must be authoritative, and all knowledge, divine or human, must be ratified and codified by the sovereign. It has a monopoly of wisdom. Otherwise every individual would have an appeal from it.Thrasymachus is not merely a lover of gain. He is also, in his way, a lover of knowledge. He is a model of that not uncommon phenomenon, “the intellectual.” His passions are in the service of things other than knowledge although he devotes himself to a life of knowledge. Knowledge is not pursued for the sake of knowledge, but he recognizes a certain superiority in the life devoted to knowing for its own sake. It is this contradiction that defeats him, for taking knowledge seriously leads beyond preoccupation with one’s private advantage toward a disinterested life devoted to universal concern.Thrasymachus, charmed by Socrates’ arguments, finally becomes his friend. The intellectual voice of the city can become tractable as the city never will. The Republic, a book about a perfect city, is characterized by having perfect interlocutors, that is, men without whom a city could not be founded and who are, at the same time, persuadable, whom argument can convince to adapt to a new kind of world which is contrary to their apparent advantage. Just as one must have almost unbelievable conditions to found the best city in deed, so one must have exceptional interlocutors to found it in speech.The wage-earner’s art is a kind of political substitute for philosophy. The intention of philosophy is to understand the nature of the arts and order them toward the production of human happiness, and to educate men to desire those things which most conduce to happiness. It can claim to rule all the arts for it alone tries to know the whole, the true whole, as opposed to the view of the whole of this time or place, and it restores the unity to a man’s life. It demands total dedication to its objects, as was required of the arts, while giving ample reward to its practitioner in that it is the perfection of his nature and his greatest satisfaction. Only in philosophy is there an identity of the concern for the proper practice of the art and that for one’s own advantage. Socrates embodies a solution to the conflicting demands which render Thrasymachus’ life meaningless: Socrates combines in a single way of life the satisfactions of the lover of knowledge and the lover of gain. All other lives are essentially self-contradictory. In the philosopher we can find both the public-spirited ruler and the satisfied man.In the character of civil society and the precariousness of human life and property there is a substantial basis for Thrasymachus’ observations which he has been unable to defend. Socrates, rather than refuting him, humiliates and punishes him.Everyone wishes to have a healthy soul. But what it consists in is the question. Is the man who obeys the laws of the community for the sake of ultimate gain precisely the same man as the one who is perfecting his soul? Are there not two definitions of justice implied here that have no necessary connection, so that the man who fulfills the commands of the one is not necessarily fulfilling the commands of the other and may even be contradicting them? As Socrates disarmingly admits, they have not defined justice but have wandered, their wandering has not been purposeless—they have not defined justice, but they have succeeded in defining the problem of justice. Justice is either what makes a city prosper or it is a virtue of the soul and hence necessary to the happiness of the individual. The question is whether the two possibilities are identical, whether devotion to the common good leads to the health of the soul or whether the man with a healthy soul is devoted to the common good. Preface to The Second Edition The Republic is, of course, a permanent book, one of the small number of books that engage the interest and sympathy of thoughtful persons wherever books are esteemed and read in freedom. No other philosophic book so powerfully expresses the human longing for justice while satisfying the intellect’s demands for clarity. Socrates understands the charms—erotic, mil... 2019-03-13 15:04  1人喜欢 Preface to The Second EditionThe Republic is, of course, a permanent book, one of the small number of books that engage the interest and sympathy of thoughtful persons wherever books are esteemed and read in freedom. No other philosophic book so powerfully expresses the human longing for justice while satisfying the intellect’s demands for clarity.Socrates understands the charms—erotic, military, political, and religious—of music, which he takes to be the most authentic primitive expressions of the soul’s hopes and terrors. But, precisely because music is central to the soul and the musicians are such virtuosos at plucking its chords, Socrates argues that it is imperative to think about how the development of the passions affects the whole of life and how musical pleasures may conflict with duties or other, less immediate pleasures. No book describes community so precisely and so completely or undertakes so rigorously to turn cold politics into family warmth.The Platonic text is now gripping because of its very radical, more than up-to-date treatment of the “gender question.” In a stunning demonstration of the power of the philosophic imagination, Plato treats the question as it was never again treated up to our own day—proving thereby that reason can penetrate to the essentials at any time or place. Perfect justice, Socrates argues in the dialogue, can be achieved only by suppression of the distinction between the sexes in all important matters and the admission of women on an equal footing to all activities of the city, particularly the most important, fighting and thinking. Corollary to this is the virtual suppression of the bodily differences between the sexes and all the psychic affects habitually accompanying those differences, especially shame, which effectively separates women from men.For students the story of man bound in the cave and breaking the bonds, moving out and up into the light of the sun, is the most memorable from their encounter with the Republic. This is the image of every serious student’s profoundest longing, the longing for liberation from convention in order to live according to nature, and one of the book’s evidently permanent aspects. The story still exercises some of its old magic, but it now encounters a fresh obstacle, for the meaning of the story is that truth is substituted for myth. Today students are taught that no such substitution is possible and that there is nothing beyond myth or “narrative.” The myths of the most primitive cultures are not, it is said, qualitatively different from the narratives of the most rigorous science. Men and women must bend to the power of myth rather than try to shuck it off as philosophy wrongly used to believe. Socrates, who gaily abandons the founding myth or noble lie he himself made up for the sake of the city, looks quixotic in this light. This can be disheartening to the young person who cares, but it can be a beginning of philosophy, for he is perplexed by a real difficulty in his own breast.Finally, in terms of my own experience of these last twenty-five years, after the Republic I translated Rousseau’s Emile, the greatest modern book on education. Rousseau was one of the great readers of Plato, and from my time on that work I gained an even greater respect for the Republic. Emile is its natural companion, and Rousseau proved his greatness by entering the lists in worthy combat with it. He shows that Plato articulated first and best all the problems, and he himself differs only with respect to some of the solutions. If one takes the two books together, one has the basic training necessary for the educational wars. And wars they are, now that doctrine tells us that these two books are cornerstones of an outlived canon.Preface直译Plato intended his works essentially for the intelligent and industrious few, a natural aristocracy determined neither by birth nor wealth, and this translation attempts to do nothing which would contradict that intention.This is intended to be a literal translation. My goal—unattained—was the accuracy of William of Moerbeke’s Latin translations of Aristotle. These versions are so faithful to Aristotle’s text that they are authorities for the correction of the Greek manuscripts, and they enabled Thomas Aquinas to become a supreme interpreter of Aristotle without knowing Greek. Such a translation is intended to be useful to the serious student, the one who wishes and is able to arrive at his own understanding of the work. He must be emancipated from the tyranny of the translator, given the means of transcending the limitations of the translator’s interpretation, enabled to discover the subtleties of the elusive original. The only way to provide the reader with this independence is by a slavish, even if sometimes cumbersome, literalness—insofar as possible always using the same English equivalent for the same Greek word. Thus the little difficulties which add up to major discoveries become evident to, or at least are not hidden from, the careful student. The translator should conceive of himself as a medium between a master whose depths he has not plumbed and an audience of potential students of that master who may be much better endowed than is the translator. His greatest vice is to believe he has adequately grasped the teaching of his author. It is least of all his function to render the work palatable to those who do not wish, or are unable, to expend the effort requisite to the study of difficult texts. Nor should he try to make an ancient mode of thought sound “contemporary.”It might be more prudent to let the reader decide whether “the beautiful and the good” are simply equivalent to “moral values.”The text becomes a mirror in which he sees only himself. Or, as Nietzsche put it, the scholars dig up what they themselves buried.像作者本人一样理解作品The modern historical consciousness has engendered a general scepticism about the truth of all “world views,” except for that one of which it is itself a product. We apply the tools of our science to the past without reflecting that those tools are also historically limited. We do not sufficiently realize that the only true historical objectivity is to understand the ancient authors as they understood themselves. We must accept, at least tentatively, the claim of the older thinkers that the truth is potentially attainable by the efforts of unaided human reason at all times and in all places.For Plato morality is composed of two elements, one of which lends a certain splendor to it which is lacking in, say, Kantian morality. And it may also be the case that these two elements are not always wholly in harmony. The good or the just need not always be beautiful or noble, for example, punishment; and the beautiful or noble need not always be good or just, for example, Achilles’ wrath.Virtue has been a theme from the beginning of the Republic, and it has received a most subtle treatment. As a matter of fact, the whole issue of the book is whether one of the virtues, justice, is choiceworthy in itself or only for its accessory advantages.对话体A dialogue is neither poetry nor philosophy; it is something of both, but it is itself and not a mere combination of the two. The fact that sometimes it does not meet the standards of the dramatic art reveals the same thing as the fact that sometimes the arguments are not up to the standards of philosophical rigor: Plato’s intention is different from that of the poet or the philosopher as we understand them. To call the dialogue a convention is to hide the problem. Perhaps this tedium is the test which Plato gives to the potential philosopher to see whether he is capable of overcoming the charm of external form; for a harsh concentration on often ugly detail is requisite to the philosophic enterprise. It is the concentration on beauty to the detriment of truth which constitutes the core of his critique of poetry, just as the indifference to forms, and hence to man, constitutes the core of his criticism of pre-Socratic philosophy. The dialogue is the synthesis of these two poles and is an organic unity. Every argument must be interpreted dramatically, for every argument is incomplete in itself and only the context can supply the missing links. And every dramatic detail must be interpreted philosophically, because these details contain the images of the problems which complete the arguments. Separately these two aspects are meaningless; together they are an invitation to the philosophic quest.By way of the drama one comes to the profoundest issues. In the Republic Socrates discusses the best regime, a regime which can never be actualized, with two young men of some theoretical gifts whom he tries to convert from the life of political ambition to one in which philosophy plays a role. He must persuade them; every step of the argument is directed to their particular opinions and characters. Their reasoned assent is crucial to the whole process. The points at which they object to Socrates’ reasoning are always most important, and so are the points when they assent when they should not. Each of the exchanges reveals something, even when the responses seem most uninteresting.The Platonic dialogues do not present a doctrine; they prepare the way for philosophizing. They are intended to perform the function of a living teacher who makes his students think, who knows which ones should be led further and which ones should be kept away from the mysteries, and who makes them exercise the same faculties and virtues in studying his words as they would have to use in studying nature independently. One must philosophize to understand them. There is a Platonic teaching, but it is no more to be found in any of the speeches than is the thought of Shakespeare to be found in the utterances of any particular character. That thought is in none of the parts but is somehow in the whole, and the process of arriving at it is more subtle than that involved in reading a treatise. One must look at the microcosm of the drama just as one would look at the macrocosm of the world which it represents. Every detail of that world is an effect of the underlying causes which can be grasped only by the mind but which can be unearthed only by using all the senses as well. Those causes are truly known only when they are come to by way of the fullest consciousness of the world which they cause. Otherwise one does not know what to look for nor can one know the full power of the causes. A teaching which gives only the principles remains abstract and is mere dogma, for the student himself does not know what the principles explain nor does he know enough of the world to be sure that their explanations are anything more than partial. It is this rich consciousness of the phenomena on which the dialogues insist, and they themselves provide a training in it.The human world is characterized by the distinction between speech and deed, and we all recognize that in order to understand a man or what he says both aspects must be taken into account. Just as no action of a man can be interpreted without hearing what he says about it himself, no speech can be accepted on its face value without comparing it to the actions of its author. The understanding of the man and his speeches is a result of a combination of the two perspectives. Thrasymachus’ blush is as important as any of his theoretical arguments.The dialogues are so constructed that each part is integrally connected with every other part; there are no meaningless accidents. Plato reproduced the essential world as he saw it. Every word has its place and its meaning, and when one cannot with assurance explain any detail, he can know that his understanding is incomplete. When something seems boring or has to be explained away as a convention, it means that the interpreter has given up and has taken his place among the ranks of those Plato intended to exclude from the center of his thought. It is always that which strikes us as commonplace or absurd which indicates that we are not open to one of the mysteries, for such sentiments are the protective mechanisms which prevent our framework from being shaken. The dialogues are constructed with an almost unbelievable care and subtlety. The drama is everywhere, even in what seem to be the most stock responses or the most purely theoretical disquisitions. In the discussion of the divided line, for example, the particular illustrations chosen fit the nature of Socrates’ interlocutor; in order to see the whole problem, the reader must ponder not only the distinction of the kinds of knowing and being but its particular effect on Glaucon and what Socrates might have said to another man. One is never allowed to sit and passively receive the words of wisdom from the mouth of the master. And this means that the translation must, insofar as humanly possible, present all the nuances of the original—the oaths, the repetitions of words, the slight changes in the form of responses, etc.—so that the reader can look at the progress of the drama with all the perceptiveness and sharpness of which his nature permits him, which he would bring to bear on any real situation which concerned him. 导论 The Republic is the true Apology of Socrates, for only in the Republic does he give an adequate treatment of the theme which was forced on him by Athens’ accusation against him. That theme is the relationship of the philosopher to the political community. Socrates is unjust not only because he breaks Athens’ laws but also because he apparently does not accept those fundamental beliefs wh... 2019-03-14 15:42  1人喜欢 导论The Republic is the true Apology of Socrates, for only in the Republic does he give an adequate treatment of the theme which was forced on him by Athens’ accusation against him. That theme is the relationship of the philosopher to the political community. Socrates is unjust not only because he breaks Athens’ laws but also because he apparently does not accept those fundamental beliefs which make civil society possible.We are likely to be misled by this apparent Socratic optimism concerning the best case—the regime where philosophers rule. Careful reading will reveal that this alleged harmony is more of a paradox than a solution, that it covers a host of tensions which come to light in the less than perfect cases. Socrates may well have reformed philosophy so that it was no longer indifferent to politics, but it was certainly no less subversive of all existing regimes than was the older philosophy. If philosophers are the natural rulers, they are the rivals of all the actual rulers. In fact, the Republic tacitly admits the truth of the charges made against Socrates: he is not orthodox in his beliefs about the gods and sets up new beings, the ideas, which are superior to the gods; the philosophers he trains will be men who both know the nature of things in the air and below the earth and are able to speak with consummate skill; and he teaches young men to despise Athens because he teaches them to love a regime in which philosophers are kings. Socrates denies that he is unjust because of this, but there must be a revolution in men’s understanding of justice for just deeds to be recognized as such. In all imperfect regimes, his presence is problematic, and he must behave prudently: he undermines the attachment to the regime and laws of the city, but he is the salvation of all those in it who wish to live the good life.The Republic is the first book which brings philosophy “down into the cities”; and we watch in it the foundation of political science, the only discipline which can bring the blessings of reason to the city. We will learn that the establishment of political science cannot be carried out without sacrifice of the dearest convictions and interests of most men; these sacrifices are so great that to many they do not seem worthwhile: one of the most civilized cities which has ever existed thought it better to sacrifice philosophy in the person of Socrates rather than face the alternative he presented. This is why philosophy needs an apology; it is a dangerous and essentially questionable activity. Socrates knew that his interests were not, and could not be, the interests of most men and their cities. We frequently do not see this and assume that his execution was a result of the blind prejudices of the past. Therefore we do not see the true radicalness of the philosophic life. Hostility to philosophy is the natural condition of man and the city.第一卷(327a-328b)Socrates will only give as much of himself as is required to regain his freedom. This situation is a paradigm of the relation of the philosopher to the city.Polemarchus sees him hurrying off and orders a slave to order him to stay. This little scene prefigures the three-class structure of the good regime developed in the Republic and outlines the whole political problem. Power is in the hands of the gentlemen, who are not philosophers. They can command the services of the many, and their strength is such that they always hold the philosophers in their grasp. Therefore it is part of the philosophers’ self-interest to come to terms with them. The question becomes: to what extent can the philosophers influence the gentlemen? It is this crucial middle class which is the primary object of the Republic and the education prescribed in it. In this episode, the first fact is brute force, leading to the recognition that no matter how reasonable one may be, everything depends upon the people’s willingness to listen. There is a confrontation here between wisdom, as represented by Socrates, and power, as represented by Polemarchus and his friends. At first the opposition of the two principles is complete, but Adeimantus and Polemarchus try to make Socrates choose to remain by offering him pleasant occupations if he does so. Glaucon accepts on behalf of his friend, and Socrates grudgingly gives in to the fait accompli. Hence wisdom and power reach a compromise, and a miniature community is formed. This accomplished, they take a vote and ratify their decision, and a new principle of rule emerges: consent. It is a mixture of powerless wisdom and unwise power. All political life will be founded on such compromises, more or less satisfactory, until the means can be discovered to permit the absolute rule of wisdom. Since he is forced to become a member of this community, Socrates soon establishes himself as its ruler by overcoming the other aspirants to the office, and then he proceeds to found a political regime in which philosophers will rule.(328b-331d)Having made their social contract, the members of the group go to Polemarchus’ house where they find his father, Cephalus, who dominates the scene, and who does so precisely because he is the father. Age is his title to rule, as it is in almost all regimes governed by ancestral custom. Age is a practical substitute for wisdom because, unlike wisdom, it is politically recognizable and easily defined. It is more feasible to teach force to respect age than to teach it to respect wisdom. The reverence for age, and hence antiquity, is one of the strongest ties which can bind a civil society together. But in order to carry on a frank discussion about justice, this reverence must be overcome, and the philosopher must take the place of the father at the center of the circle. Socrates must induce Cephalus to leave the scene, because Cephalus is beyond reason, and it would be impious to dispute him.Once authority has been banished, Socrates and his companions can begin a critical examination of the ancestral code, of the conventional view of justice. This is the burden of the rest of Book I. All traditional opinions are discredited; and unaided reason, free of limiting prejudices, can begin the search for an understanding of justice which is not merely opinion. This criticism is a destructive activity in the name of liberation. It is a perilous undertaking for men who must remain members of civil society and could not properly take place under the eyes of Cephalus. He stands for those restraints on body and soul which are essential to the preservation of the city. There are certain uncomfortable issues, the raising of which usually indicates an inclination to vice on the part of those who do so. The practice of posing the extreme questions is a bad one, for one of its necessary consequences is corruption of the habits of the virtues. The only justification for questioning the old way would be that as a result a new, superior, way which Cephalus does not know of might emerge. The ancestral is by its nature silent about its own foundations; it is an imposing presence that awes those who might be tempted to look too closely.Cephalus typifies the ancestral which cannot, but must, be questioned. Although his appearance is brief, by means of a few circumspect inquiries Socrates manages to reveal his character and his principles and, hence, those of the tradition he represents. Then the old man is delicately set aside. From the point of view of justice, eros is a terrible thing, a savage beast. For a man like Cephalus, life is always split between sinning and repenting. Only by the death of eros and its charms can such a gentleman become fully reliable, for his eros leads neither to justice nor philosophy but to intense, private bodily satisfaction. Characteristic of Cephalus and men like him is a salutary forgetting of the preconditions of their kind of life.Socrates’ procedure is quite strange. In the first place he says nothing about half of what interests Cephalus: he does not mention piety, whether this is because he thinks Cephalus’ understanding of piety is adequate or because he is not interested in piety. Second, in his discussion of paying one’s debts, Socrates is silent about the gods and the sacrifices owed to them. In a word, Socrates forgets the divine, which is Cephalus’ prime preoccupation, and makes the discussion one concerning human justice alone. This, along with his unwillingness to face the fact that he might be ignorant of the very obligations he is trying so hard to meet, is what causes Cephalus to leave. While the discussion is going on, he is elsewhere performing sacrifices to the gods, concerned with what is forgotten in that discussion.It becomes Polemarchus’ responsibility to explain what standard should be looked to when one deviates from the letter of the law—which is equivalent to stating the purpose for which laws are instituted.(331d-336a)The relation between justice conceived as one’s own good and justice conceived as the common good is the abiding concern of the Republic; Cephalus and Polemarchus represent the two poles. Also at this point, with the recognition that a man’s property in money only extends so far as he can use that money well—only so far as is good for him—private property becomes radically questionable.Every nation has wars and must defend itself; it can only do so if it has citizens who care for it and are willing to kill the citizens of other nations. If the distinction between friends and enemies, and the inclination to help the former and harm the latter, were obliterated from the heart and mind of man, political life would be impossible. This is the necessary political definition of justice, and it produces its specific kind of human nobility expressed in the virtue of the citizen. Socrates does not simply reject it as he appears to do. The warriors in his best regime, whom he compares to noble dogs, share in the most salient characteristic of noble dogs: gentleness toward acquaintances and harshness toward strangers. This is the key to the strengths and weaknesses of the political man.Socrates and Polemarchus discover that the world is divided up among the arts and there is nothing left for an art of justice. A doctor may do good to his friends and hence be just, but justice is nothing beyond the exercise of his art, which is something other than justice. Arts are the means of doing good and harm; arts have subject matters but justice does not; hence justice is not an art and cannot do good. Justice has disappeared. Moreover, Socrates insists on pointing out that the arts are neutral, that they can effect opposite results with equal ease. However that may be, the assumption that justice is an art does lead to serious difficulties, expressed ironically in the notion that the just man is both useless and a thief.The primary concern of the just man must be something Polemarchus has never considered: what counts is not so much the disposition to give the good things to friends, but knowing what those good things are. Justice must be some kind of knowledge. Justice necessarily and primarily demands a knowledge of what is good for man and the community; otherwise the knowledge and skills of the arts are in the service of authoritative myths.Artisans were content with their competence and closed to the larger questions. To be ignorant in Socrates’ way is to be open to the whole. The artisans are models of knowledge, but their kind of knowledge is not applicable to the domain of poets and statesmen. The problem is to combine the concerns of poets and statesmen with knowledge as artisans possess it. Such knowledge is what Socrates is seeking.The doctor can produce health, but that health is good he does not learn from medicine, and similarly with all of the arts. They deal with partial goods which presuppose a knowledge of the whole good to which they minister. The error of the discussion was to look for a specific subject matter for justice, to make it one among many arts, to act as though only the doctor had anything to say about medicine. To help a sick friend one needs not only a doctor but someone who knows to whom health is fitting and how many other goods should be sacrificed to it, and who can direct the doctor to do what will most help the patient. There are master arts which rule whole groups of ministerial arts and are necessary to them. These are what Aristotle calls architectonic arts. The carpenter, the mason, the roofer, etc.—all are in need of an architect if a house is to be produced. He is more important than they are, he guides them, and he does not need to be a carpenter, a mason, or a roofer himself. Without the architect, all the other arts connected with building lack an end and are useless or worse. Similarly, justice must be a master art, ruling the arts which produce partial goods so as to serve the whole good. In other words, justice must be knowledge of that good which none of the other arts knows but which each presupposes. Lawgivers actually organize all the arts and tell their practitioners what they can and cannot do. What Socrates proposes is a legislative or political science. If each of the artisans obeys the law established by a legislator who is wise in this science, he would be just, and justice would take care of itself in law-abiding practice of the arts. In this way the arts would provide what is fitting to each man. Hence Socrates teaches that in order to be just in the full sense one must be a philosopher, and that philosophy is necessary to justice.The poets and the laws tell Polemarchus the proper place of each thing, and this is why he sees no difficulty in doing good to friends. His is a prephilosophic world, and its authorities must be completely discredited before philosophy can even be sought. Polemarchus’ view is not merely a result of his laziness but a product of his attachment to family and city. He makes the primitive identification of the good with his own. Men who are outsiders can become friends only by becoming “naturalized” members of the family; blood ties are what count. Even the loyalty to the city is understood as an extension of the family. This tendency to see the good in one’s own and to devote oneself to it is one of the most powerful urges of human nature and the source of great devotion and energy. Once the distinction between what is good and one’s own is made, the principle of loyalty to family and city is undermined. In order to be just, one must seek good men wherever they may be, even in nations fighting one’s own nation. If the good must be pursued, then caring for one’s own must be extinguished, or it will make one unjust and impede the quest for the good. This undermines family and city; and they must attempt to prevent the distinction from even coming to light. Certainly, Polemarchus would regard the abandonment of his primary loyalties as the destruction of the purpose and dignity of his life. If, however, he is to be consistent with the argument, he must make this sacrifice. A man who wishes to be just must be cosmopolitan. Thus far, Socrates has led us to the observation that in order to do good to friends and harm to enemies one need only be a philosopher and give up one’s attachments to those whom most men call friends.With all of Polemarchus’ admiration for justice, it is not the highest thing, not sought for as such. Justice is more of a means to the end of preserving life and property than itself the end of a good life. Polemarchus’ definition of justice might be regarded as the rule requisite to the satisfaction of collective selfishness: be loyal to the members of your own group so that you can best take advantage of the outsiders. There is a tension in Polemarchus—of which he is unaware—be—tween his love of property and his love of justice. This is what Socrates exposes and what Thrasymachus is about to exploit.(336b-354b)Thrasymachus has stripped away the veils that covered the selfishness of the rulers and their laws. Those laws themselves serve the private interest of a part of the city and do harm to the rest of it. Laws are not directed to the common good. And yet the city will continue to put lawbreakers to death as unjust men and enemies of the common good. The anger awakened in men by the sight of indifference or hostility to law is a powerful force in protecting the law and hence the city, but it can also be the enemy of justice and is certainly the greatest enemy of philosophy. Thrasymachus, whose art gives speech to the passions of the city, is its agent in condemning Socrates, and his action in the service of this passion imitates the city’s action.When the poor, or the rich, or the old families, or a tyrant take over the rule in a city, its laws change correspondingly. The sovereign makes the laws, and those laws always happen to reflect its interests. Oligarchies make laws which favor and protect oligarchy; democracy makes laws which favor and protect democracy, etc. The regime is the absolute beginning point; there is nothing beyond it. To understand the kind of justice practiced in any city one must look to the regime. The laws have their source in the human, all too human. He who obeys them, in reverence or in fear, is simply serving the advantage of the stronger, whether the stronger is a single man, or the great majority of the people, or any other politically relevant group within the city. If this be the case, however, prudence and self-interest would seem to dictate to the individual that either he should try to evade the law or else become the lawmaker himself. Thrasymachus’ thesis is simply that the regime makes the laws and that the members of the regime look to their own good and not the common good. The city is not a unity but a composite of opposed parties, and the party which wins out over the others is the source of the law. There is no fundamental difference between tyranny and other regimes because they all have the same selfish end. Justice, therefore, is not a fundamental phenomenon; the lawgiver cannot base himself upon it, for justice is a result of law.Socrates does not deny that it is the stronger who rule and establish the law. He silently accepts the view that all existing regimes are as Thrasymachus says they are. The two men thus agree that the character of the ruling group is the core of politics, that the rulers are the stronger, and that justice is a political phenomenon and must be embodied in the laws of a city. The issue between them is whether all rulers, all lawgivers, must be selfish in the way Thrasymachus insists they are. From this point on the question is the regime—who rules; and Socrates tries to find a kind of man, a political class, which is both strong and public-spirited.Socrates turns, then, to the criticism of Thrasymachus’ view of the rulers. He quickly succeeds in embarrassing him by the reflection that sometimes rulers make mistakes; hence obedience to the law may be as much to their disadvantage as their advantage. Justice is not the advantage of the stronger unless the stronger (the rulers) know what their own advantage is. The emphasis now shifts from strength to knowledge.Like Polemarchus, Thrasymachus takes it for granted that the most common objects of desire—particularly whatever has to do wealth—are advantageous and that knowledge of them is a given. Thrasymachus is the more thoughtful voice of the most thoughtless opinions and desires. He wishes to educate a clever, selfish man who knows how to get what he wants.The city could hardly admit that its laws are essentially fallible. Its pronouncements must be authoritative, and all knowledge, divine or human, must be ratified and codified by the sovereign. It has a monopoly of wisdom. Otherwise every individual would have an appeal from it.Thrasymachus is not merely a lover of gain. He is also, in his way, a lover of knowledge. He is a model of that not uncommon phenomenon, “the intellectual.” His passions are in the service of things other than knowledge although he devotes himself to a life of knowledge. Knowledge is not pursued for the sake of knowledge, but he recognizes a certain superiority in the life devoted to knowing for its own sake. It is this contradiction that defeats him, for taking knowledge seriously leads beyond preoccupation with one’s private advantage toward a disinterested life devoted to universal concern.Thrasymachus, charmed by Socrates’ arguments, finally becomes his friend. The intellectual voice of the city can become tractable as the city never will. The Republic, a book about a perfect city, is characterized by having perfect interlocutors, that is, men without whom a city could not be founded and who are, at the same time, persuadable, whom argument can convince to adapt to a new kind of world which is contrary to their apparent advantage. Just as one must have almost unbelievable conditions to found the best city in deed, so one must have exceptional interlocutors to found it in speech.The wage-earner’s art is a kind of political substitute for philosophy. The intention of philosophy is to understand the nature of the arts and order them toward the production of human happiness, and to educate men to desire those things which most conduce to happiness. It can claim to rule all the arts for it alone tries to know the whole, the true whole, as opposed to the view of the whole of this time or place, and it restores the unity to a man’s life. It demands total dedication to its objects, as was required of the arts, while giving ample reward to its practitioner in that it is the perfection of his nature and his greatest satisfaction. Only in philosophy is there an identity of the concern for the proper practice of the art and that for one’s own advantage. Socrates embodies a solution to the conflicting demands which render Thrasymachus’ life meaningless: Socrates combines in a single way of life the satisfactions of the lover of knowledge and the lover of gain. All other lives are essentially self-contradictory. In the philosopher we can find both the public-spirited ruler and the satisfied man.In the character of civil society and the precariousness of human life and property there is a substantial basis for Thrasymachus’ observations which he has been unable to defend. Socrates, rather than refuting him, humiliates and punishes him.Everyone wishes to have a healthy soul. But what it consists in is the question. Is the man who obeys the laws of the community for the sake of ultimate gain precisely the same man as the one who is perfecting his soul? Are there not two definitions of justice implied here that have no necessary connection, so that the man who fulfills the commands of the one is not necessarily fulfilling the commands of the other and may even be contradicting them? As Socrates disarmingly admits, they have not defined justice but have wandered, their wandering has not been purposeless—they have not defined justice, but they have succeeded in defining the problem of justice. Justice is either what makes a city prosper or it is a virtue of the soul and hence necessary to the happiness of the individual. The question is whether the two possibilities are identical, whether devotion to the common good leads to the health of the soul or whether the man with a healthy soul is devoted to the common good. (357a-367e) Bound by its ancestral laws and myths, the city, like Thrasymachus, does not raise the question of nature; in fact it hinders the question from arising. It wishes to give the accidents of this time and place the same status as the unchanging principles of all things. It presents a certain combination of nature and convention as the horizon within which its citizens must live and act... 2019-03-15 07:33  4人喜欢 (357a-367e)Bound by its ancestral laws and myths, the city, like Thrasymachus, does not raise the question of nature; in fact it hinders the question from arising. It wishes to give the accidents of this time and place the same status as the unchanging principles of all things. It presents a certain combination of nature and convention as the horizon within which its citizens must live and act. The first effort of philosophy or science was to sort out the various elements in our experience, to discover the true cause of lightning, eclipses, etc., by means of investigation unhampered by authority. Philosophy had to liberate itself from the weight of respectable opinion and to become aware of the existence of rationally comprehensible principles of the phenomena seen in the heavens; in other words, nature had to be discovered against the will of the city.Glaucon presents the political supplement to pre-Socratic natural philosophy: the city limits men in the pursuit of the good things, but its only justification for doing so is the need to preserve itself.Adeimantus reveals his deepest wishes by insisting that justice be easy and pleasant. It should in itself incorporate the advantages conventionally said to result from its practice. The poets promise just men great honors and sensual pleasures in this life and the next. Without making it quite explicit, Adeimantus longs for justice itself to be like or to be an adequate substitute for these honors and pleasures.We must first discover what a healthy city is and what a healthy soul is. The very coming to awareness of such a city and soul transforms and educates these young men.(369b-372e)Socrates suggests that the bodily desires are very simple and easy to satisfy. In this he is not unlike Rousseau in his opposition to Hobbes. The more complicated desires, the ones that cause the injustice of which Glaucon has spoken, are the result of a mixture of the desires of the body with the desires of the soul. Although the entrance of these desires connected with the soul serves to corrupt this first city, Socrates looks on them with more favor than does Rousseau, for they are the first manifestations of a longing for a natural perfection higher than that of the body.Glaucon’s desire to rule is the expression of an independently noble impulse which, if fully developed, would find its satisfaction only in contemplation and would wish to overcome the body’s desires in order to enjoy its own peculiar pleasure undisturbed. His passionate nature has been tutored by the common opinions about what is good and by the materialist philosophy of which he has heard. Glaucon is thus a dangerous man but also an eminently interesting and educable one. His desires lead him to despise law and convention; as long as his limitless desires have as their objects the things he lists as desirable in his speech, he will long for tyranny. But it is precisely this freedom from law and convention combined with his passion that may enable him to climb to the human peaks. As is the case with all the young men most attractive to Socrates, Glaucon has a potential for good or evil. With Glaucon, we have the opportunity of seeing how Socrates educates and his effect on the young. He undertakes a perilous activity but one full of promise.Socrates fulfills the harsh conditions Glaucon set for the just man, but also lives in great pleasure. He does not live without the ordinary pleasures because he is an ascetic, but because the intensity of his joy in philosophy makes him indifferent to them. Once Glaucon can see the possibility of such a way of life he will be cured of his desire for tyranny.The solution to the political problem embodied in Adeimantus’ city is not a human one. A human solution requires the emancipation of desire, for only then can virtue arise. Humanity requires a self-overcoming; not because life is essentially struggle, but because man’s dual nature is such that the goods of the soul cannot be brought to light without the body’s being tempted and, therefore, without a tyranny of soul over body.(372e-376c)War is requisite to the emergence of humanity; as the city of sows was gentle and reflected a fundamental harmony among men, so the city of warriors is harsh and reflects a fundamental conflict among men. Paradoxically this is the first human city. A city cannot claim that it does not harm other men; its justification can only be in the quality of life it provides for its citizens.血气Spiritedness is a difficult motive to understand, and its character can only be seen by contrasting it with desire. Desires are directed to the satisfaction of a need: they express an incompleteness and yearn for completeness. Hunger, thirst, sexual desire, etc., are all immediately related to a goal and their meaning is simple. The goal of spiritedness is much harder to discern. Its simplest manifestation is anger, and it is not immediately manifest what needs are fulfilled by anger. Spiritedness seems characterized more by the fact that it overcomes desire than by any positive goal of its own. Moreover, the desires related to the body—which are the only ones that have appeared thus far—all have a self-preservative function, whereas spiritedness, on the contrary, is characterized by an indifference to life. It may indeed aid in the preservation of life, but it can just as well place honor above life. The city may exist for the sake of life, but it needs men who are willing to die for it.Spiritedness really represents a new part of the soul, one which will rule the desires and establish a principle of hierarchy in the soul. Warriors’ services cannot be measured by money, for money is a standard for evaluating the contributions made toward the satisfaction of desire or the preservation of life. Spiritedness is beyond the economic system. Only men who pursue self-preservation and the gratification of bodily desire can be counted on to act according to the principles of economic “rationality.”However that may be, the city needs defenders, and it also now needs rulers, for its feverish desires make living together impossible without control.Socrates most surprisingly draws the conclusion that the good guardian is possible if, in addition to being spirited, his nature is philosophic. In a book famous for the proposal that philosophers be kings, this is the first mention of philosophy or philosophers. Philosophy is invoked in the city only for the purpose of solving a political problem.The philosophers are gentlemen because they pursue knowledge and not gain; their object does not entail exploitation of others. The love of knowledge is a motive necessary to the rulers of this city in order to temper their love of victory and wealth. But the philosophers are the opposites of the dogs inasmuch as they are always questing to know that of which they are ignorant, whereas the dogs must cut themselves off from the unknown and are hostile to foreign charms. They love their own and not the good. And this must be so, for otherwise they would not make the necessary distinction between their flock and those who are likely to attack it. The warrior principle is doing good to friends and harm to enemies. It is true that their love of the known extends their affections beyond themselves to the city; it partakes of the universalizing or cosmopolitan effect of philosophy. But that love ends at the frontier of the city. They remain the irrational beasts who love those who mistreat them as well as those who are kind to them. No mention is made of the fact that dogs do not characteristically love the flocks but the masters to whom the flock belongs and who teach them and command them to care for the flock. These dogs as yet have no masters and are therefore incomplete. The masters whom they will know and hence love are philosophers and knowers. The dogs’ nature opens them to the command of philosophy but does not make them philosophers.(376c-383c)Courage, moderation, and justice—three of the four cardinal virtues defined in the Republic—are each mentioned in the context of the critique of poetry, but the fourth, wisdom, is not. It would seem necessary to infer that the warriors are not to be wise and that the beliefs about the gods are their substitute for wisdom. Those beliefs about the gods are a nonphilosophic equivalent of knowledge of the whole. The first segment of the study of poetry constitutes, therefore, a theology, a theology not true but salutary. Its doctrines are simple: the gods are good; they are the cause of the good; and they do not deceive.Gods must be good and can only cause good; the deeper teaching implied here is that the good is the highest and most powerful principle of the cosmos. As opposed to the earlier views of the first things which the poets express, chaos is not the origin of all things; and the universe is fundamentally a cosmos, not a battlefield of contrary and discordant elements, as the poets represent it to be in their terrible tales of the family lives and wars of the gods.Statesmen require a human prudence in which the gods can give them no guidance. This reform of the poetic account of the gods leads to the consequence that in the future the poetic depictions of the gods cannot serve as models for human conduct.(386a-392c)阿基里斯Socrates brings Achilles to the foreground in order to analyze his character and ultimately to do away with him as the model for the young. The figure of Achilles, more than any teaching or law, compels the souls of Greeks and all men who pursue glory. He is the hero of heroes, admired and imitated by all. And this is what Socrates wishes to combat; he teaches that if Achilles is the model, men will not pursue philosophy, that what Achilles stands for is inimical to the founding of the best city and the practice of the best way of life. Socrates is engaging in a contest with Homer for the title of teacher of the Greeks—or of mankind. One of his principal goals is to put himself in the place of Achilles as the authentic representation of the best human type. One need only look at their physical descriptions to recognize that they are polar opposites. Socrates is attempting to work a fantastic transformation of men’s tastes in making the ugly old man more attractive than the fair youth.With his analysis of Achilles, Socrates is actually beginning a critique of the courage based on spiritedness which is thus also a critique of the warrior class of his city. The surface presentation of spiritedness and spirited men in the Republic is that they are easily educable and can become the foundation of the good city. This is a necessary presupposition of the good city. But beneath that surface runs a current which shows that spiritedness is a most problematic element of the soul and the city, and that the good city is hence most improbable.Spiritedness first appeared in the city as the means to protect its stolen acquisitions. And this is a key to the nature of spiritedness: it is very much connected with the defense of one’s own.Anger is unreasoning and can easily mistake its sense of injustice for the fact of injustice. Anger is always self-righteous; it is at the root of moral indignation, but moral indignation is a dangerous and, although necessary, often unreasonable and even immoral passion. The tendency of anger is to give the color of reason and morality to selfishness. This has been revealed by the only character in the dialogue who has expressed anger; Thrasymachus’ anger defends the city’s own against philosophy when philosophy threatens the city’s injustice. Spiritedness is the only element in the city or man which by its very nature is hostile to philosophy.Philosophy leads to lack of concern with one’s own; it is concerned with things that are not threatened, that exist always. The activity of philosophy—the soul’s contemplation of the principles of all things—brings with it a pleasure of a purity and intensity that causes all other pleasures to pale. Philosophers need not live according to myths which assure the permanence and significance of things which are not permanent or significant. Death is overcome by a lack of concern with one’s individual fate, by forgetting it, in the contemplation of eternity.(392c-403c)Poets must appeal to and flatter the dominant passions of the spectators. Those passions are fear, pity, and contempt. The spectators want to cry or to laugh.(403c-412b)In the city of sows, the harmony of public and private interest was insured by the simplicity of desire, natural plenty, and the skill of the arts. Once desire has been emancipated, the virtue of moderation—understood as the control of spiritedness as well as desire—is used to re-establish that harmony.(412b-416d)In the Socratic view, political justice requires that unequal men receive unequal honors and unequal shares in ruling.All unjust conventional inequalities must be overcome without abandoning the respect for the inequality constituted by differences in virtue. The difficulty, of course, stems from private interest and property. The more powerful always want to have more, and the weaker are willing to settle for equality. It is not easy to make men without virtues see and accept their inferiority and give up hopes of rising. Reason and sentiment demand a solution by means of which men get what they deserve. But in all actual regimes there are one of two practical solutions: there is a hierarchy, but one that mixes nature with convention by making ruling depend on some more easily recognized and accepted title than virtue; or there is no standard or hierarchy at all. Each solution reflects a part of the truth, but each is incomplete.The lie, because it is a lie, points up the problems it is designed to solve. In any event, the character of men’s desires would make it impossible for a rational teaching to be the public teaching. Today it is generally admitted that every society is based on myths, myths which render acceptable the particular form of justice incorporated in the system. Socrates speaks more directly: the myths are lies.The noble lie is precisely an attempt to rationalize the justice of civil society; it is an essential part of an attempt to elaborate a regime which most embodies the principles of natural justice and hence transcends the false justice of other regimes. The thoughtful observer will find that the noble lie is a political expression of truths which it itself leads him to consider. In other words, there are good reasons for every part of this lie, and that is why a rational man would be willing to tell it.The Socratic teaching that a good society requires a fundamental falsehood is the direct opposite of that of the Enlightenment which argued that civil society could dispense with lies and count on selfish calculation to make men loyal to it. The difference between the two views can be reduced to a difference concerning the importance of moderation, both for the preservation of civil society and for the full development of individual men’s natures. The noble lie is designed to give men grounds for resisting, in the name of the common good, their powerful desires. The great thinkers of the Enlightenment did not deny that such lies are necessary to induce men to sacrifice their desires and to care for the common good. They were no more hopeful than Socrates concerning most men’s natural capacity to overcome their inclinations and devote themselves to the public welfare. What they insisted was that it was possible to build a civil society in which men did not have to care for the common good, in which desire would be channeled rather than controlled. A civil society which provided security and some prospect of each man’s acquiring those possessions he most wishes would be both a more simple and more sure solution than any utopian attempt to make men abandon their selfish wishes. Such a civil society could count on men’s rational adhesion, for it would be an instrument in procuring their own good as they see it. Therefore moderation of the appetites would be not only unnecessary but undesirable, for it would render a man more independent of the regime whose purpose it is to satisfy the appetites.The Socratic response to this argument would be twofold. First, he would simply deny the possibility of a regime which would never be compelled to call for real sacrifices from its citizens. This is particularly true in time of war. Second, such a civil society can be founded only by changing the meaning of rationality. For this society, rationality consists in the discovery of the best means of satisfying desires. The irrationality of those desires must be neglected; in particular, men must neglect the irrationality of their unwillingness to face the fact that they must die, of their constant search for the means of self-preservation as if they could live forever.(419c-427c)The guardian who is totally devoted to the common good is the prototype of the philosopher who is devoted to knowing the good.In relation to its neighbors, the city is not motivated by considerations of justice but by those of preservation. Justice has to do with the domestic life of the city and cannot be extended beyond its borders. This is a point to be considered when examining the analogy between city and man: justice is supposed to be the same in both, so one would expect that a man should behave toward other men as does a city toward other cities.Adeimantus’ particular form of spiritedness, when tamed, is a scourge of injustice, a source of primitive justice.(427c-445e)Justice, in the city at least, means only the presence of the three other virtues: moderation, courage, and wisdom. (449a-473c) Women, family, and philosophy are all of the domain of the erotic, which seems to be what is most intransigently private. If the perfection of the city cannot comprehend the perfection of the soul, the city will look ugly in comparison to the soul’s beauty and be a proper subject of comedy; its pretensions will be ludicrous. This is part of Socrates’ attempt to politicize the erot... 2019-03-15 09:50  1人喜欢 (449a-473c) Women, family, and philosophy are all of the domain of the erotic, which seems to be what is most intransigently private.If the perfection of the city cannot comprehend the perfection of the soul, the city will look ugly in comparison to the soul’s beauty and be a proper subject of comedy; its pretensions will be ludicrous.This is part of Socrates’ attempt to politicize the erotic, to act as though it made no demands that cannot conform to the public life of the city. Shame is an essential component of the erotic relations between men and women. The need for overcoming shame becomes clear in relation to what Socrates considers to be another form of eros—intellectual or philosophic eros. Souls, in order to know, must strip away the conventions which cover their nature. Shame prevents them from doing this just as it prevents them from stripping their bodies.The character of the women in a society has a great deal to do with the character of the men; for when the men are young, the women have a great deal to do with their rearing, and when they are older, they must please the women. In particular, women have a more powerful attachment to the home and the children than do men. They are involved with the private things which are likely to oppose the city. They characteristically do not like to send their sons off to war. Further, women have much to do with men’s desire to possess money. Women’s favor can be won by gifts, and they have a taste for adornment and public display. Women play a great role in the corruption of regimes, as will be shown in Books VIII and IX. If half the city is not educated to the city’s virtues, the city will not subsist. This is a city without homes, and the women have more to overcome if they are to accept it, for their natures lead them to love the private things most and draw the men to a similar love. They must share the men’s tastes, or they will resist the changes in the family Socrates is about to propose.He compares the city to a body all parts of which share the same pleasures and pains. This city does not attain to that degree of unity, however, for one thing cannot be made public: the body. Everyone’s body is his own. The minds could conceivably be made to think similar. But if a man stubs his toe, no other man can share his pain. Thus the unity of the city depends on that same forgetting of the body which has been a golden thread running through the whole discourse. The body is what stands in the way of devotion to the common good; it is the source of the desire and the need for privacy.Philosophy is essentially a private activity and that the city must always be ruled by prejudices. Moreover, from the example of the city in speech, a man would learn what he must overcome in himself in order to become a philosopher. Socrates forgets the body in order to make clear its importance.If philosophy is desirable, so are these efforts to conquer everything that attaches one to particularity. Socrates can contemplate going naked where others go clothed; he is not afraid of ridicule. He can also contemplate sexual intercourse where others are stricken with terror; he is not afraid of moral indignation. In other words, he treats the comic seriously and the tragic lightly. He can smile where others cry and remain earnest where others laugh. In the Symposium he says that the true poet must be both tragedian and comedian, implying that the true poet is the philosopher. Here he shows that the man who has both gifts must use them to oppose the ways the vulgar tragic and comic poets use them; he must treat the tragic lightly and the comic seriously, hence reversing their usual roles. The man who is able to do this is already a philosopher. In both cases, it is shame which must be opposed; for shame is the wall built by convention which stands between the mind and the light. The ordinary poetry appeals to that shame, accepting its edicts as law, while philosophic poetry overcomes it. Shame, in both the case of nakedness and that of incest, is spiritedness’ means of controlling eros for the sake of preservation and the city. The effect of that shame is pervasive and subtle, making the thinkable appear unthinkable. The mind requires heroic efforts in order to become aware of the distortions of its vision caused by shame and to overcome them.(473c-487a)Beginning from the common sense of political men and maintaining their perspective throughout, Socrates demonstrates that they must tolerate and encourage philosophy. This constitutes a defense of philosophy from the political point of view. Philosophy is necessary to this regime, to the best regime, because without philosophy the regime cannot find impartial rulers who have considered the proper distribution of the good things. In other words, the philosopher is the only kind of knower whose attention is devoted to the whole. Statesmen are always preoccupied with the here-and-now, but the interpretation of the here-and-now depends on some knowledge of the whole. If justice means giving each man what is fitting for him, a statesman must know what man is and his relation to the other beings.Socrates teaches that wisdom and political power are distinct. Their coming together can only be due to the coincidence that a man who is wise happens also to be a ruler, thus uniting the two things; nothing in their two natures leads the one to the other. Political power serves the passions or desires of the members of a city, and a multitude cannot philosophize. It may use the results of science or philosophy, but it will use them to its own ends and will thereby distort them. Moreover, the wise man by himself is more of a threat to a regime than a helper. Intellectual progress is not the same as political progress, and, because there is not a simple harmony between the works of the mind and the works of the city, the philosopher without power must remain in an uneasy relationship with the city and its beliefs. Enlightenment endangers philosophy because it tempts philosophers to sacrifice their quest for the truth in favor of attempting to edify the public; in an “enlightened” world, philosophy risks being made a tool of unwise and even tyrannical regimes, thus giving those regimes the color of reason and losing its function as the standard for criticism of them. Enlightenment also endangers the city by publicly calling into question its untrue but essential beliefs.The philosopher learns as other men love—simply because it seems good and an end in itself; as a matter of fact, learning is an erotic activity for him. Love of learning is another expression of man’s eros, of his longing for completeness. Such a man wants to know everything, aware that no part can be understood without being considered in relation to the whole. Socrates simply describes that rare but revealing phenomenon, the theoretical man, he who proves the possibility of disinterested knowledge. He is the man who can preserve his disinterestedness even in the difficult human questions which concern him most immediately, because he is more attracted by clarity than life, satisfaction of desire, or honor. The philosopher introduces to the city a dimension of reason that had not been discerned in the earlier discussion of it.Socrates defines the second salient characteristic of the philosopher: he is a lover of the one idea of each thing and not the many things which participate in the ideas, of being and not becoming, of knowledge and not opinion.The ideas are the permanent ones behind the changing manys to which we apply the same name. Thus they are the causes of the things seen and heard—causes not in the sense that they explain the coming-into-being of a particular thing but in the sense that they explain its character. The idea of man is the cause of a particular man’s being a man rather than a collection of the elements to which he can be reduced. The ideas, then, are the justification of the philosophic life. If there are no permanent entities, if everything is in flux, there can be no knowledge.In undertaking to look for justice, Socrates and his companions were looking for something real, which has a higher dignity than, and can act as a standard for, the imperfect justice which they found in men and cities. If there is not something like an idea of justice, their quest is futile.And it is in this quest for the universal principles that the theoretical man first meets the opposition of the unphilosophic men who make up a city. Unphilosophic men are loyal not to cities in general but to their own city; they love not men in general, but this particular man or woman; they are not interested in the nature of the species, but their own fates. However, all the things to which citizens are most passionately attached have a lessened reality in the eyes of the theoretical man; what is peculiar to these things, what constitutes their charm for the practical man, must be overcome in order to understand them. For the practical man the particular things to which he is attached are the real things, and he will resist any attempt to go beyond them to “the more general case,” which would destroy their character and his capacity to possess them as his very own. The city in speech of the philosopher comes into being only by depreciating Athens, and any other city in which men can live. To the philosopher the city in speech is more lovable and more real than any of the particular cities which are to him poor imitations of the city in speech. In order to love what is, he must be a man who does not have the same needs as other men; he must have overcome, at least in thought, his own becoming. For the theoretical man, particular things are real only insofar as they “participate” in the ideas. They are not but are like what is. Hence the practical men who love particular things make the mistake of taking a thing to be that which it is like. They thus dream their lives away, never laying hold of a reality. But they cannot be told this. They must be soothed and deceived, and it is questionable how far they can afford to be tolerant of the philosopher whose interests are so different and conflicting.Poetry, in its most common usage, adorns the particular and renders it more attractive, hence making it more difficult to transcend. It does so because it must appeal to audiences of men who cannot and do not wish to make that transcendence. It is thus an opponent of philosophy.The virtues connected with the city help to preserve the city and thereby its inhabitants; preservation, or mere life, is the goal. The virtues connected with philosophy aid in the quest for the comprehensive truth; the good life is the goal. Both goals make their demands, and those demands conflict. There are, then, two kinds of virtue: philosophic virtue and demotic, or vulgar, virtue.(503b-540c)Socrates introduces the new theme when he tells Adeimantus that the study of justice, far from being the most important subject, is worthless unless it is completed by another. The true science, to which the others are only ministerial, is the study of the good. This comes as a surprise to Adeimantus, who is totally devoted to the city. It is a step beyond the earlier recognition that the idea of justice transcends any possible city. In turn, the idea of justice is only one of many ideas, which are treated in the comprehensive study of the good.The erotic Glaucon is told that eros is the soul’s longing for completeness, to be full of being, to know everything which is. Philosophy, which was introduced as a means to actualize the city’s good and is being used as a means to discover the good, turns out to be the end, the human good.Why does Socrates insist that our situation is that of men who mistake images for realities? It would seem more sensible to say that we take objects too seriously, that we do not recognize the importance and superior reality of the causes or first principles. How can it be said that we are bound to the lowest level of the line? The answer seems to be that the cave is the city and that our attachment to the city binds us to certain authoritative opinions about things. We do not see men as they are but as they are represented to us by legislators and poets. A Greek sees things differently from the way a Persian sees them. One need only think of the question of nakedness as discussed in Book V, or the significance of cows to Hindus as opposed to other men, to realize how powerful are the various horizons constituted by law or convention. Legislators and poets are the makers of these horizons; or, to use the symbols of the cave image, they are the men who carry the statues and the other things the reflections of which the prisoners see. These objects are not natural; they are themselves images of natural objects produced with cunning art so as to look like their originals, but are adapted to serve the special interests of the artists. In other words, we do not see things directly, but through the opinions we are taught about them. Those opinions are not accurate reflections of nature but are adapted to serve the needs of the city. They are designed to make a man love his city, and therefore they have to invest the city with all sorts of special significance and have no basis in nature. The first and most difficult of tasks is the separation of what exists by nature from what is merely made by man.The divided line and the cave teach that there are two fatal temptations of the mind. The first is that of the men who insist on the significance of the images in the cave and constitute themselves as their defenders and hence the accusers of the philosophers. They are often men of very high intelligence who are forced to hate reason by their unwillingness to renounce the charm and significance of their particular experiences and those of their people. They are enemies of whatever leads in the direction of universality, of anything that would tend to break down the heterogeneity, the particularity and distinctiveness, of the ways to which they are attached. Their dominant trait is piety, which frequently turns into fanaticism. These men are among the leaders of peoples and are protectors of the people’s beliefs. This account of their nature acts as a corrective of the view that the people can easily be persuaded to accept philosophers as kings.The other great temptation is that of those who are too easily liberated and do not learn in the cave what must be learned about man and the soul. These men dwell on the third level of the line and are best represented by the mathematicians. They escape to a world of universality and are charmed by the competence of their reason to order and explain that world. The homogeneity of numbers which can apply to all things permits them to reduce all the particularities in the world to unities. They tend to forget the questionableness of their own beginnings or principles and the natural heterogeneity of the different kinds of things; they are forgetful of qualitative differences and, hence, of the ideas. As the pious men were hostile to the ideas because the ideas threatened the heterogeneity of their world, these competent men are hostile to the ideas because they threaten the homogeneity of their world. Such were the early philosophers who while watching the sky fell into holes, the men ridiculed by Aristophanes because their science could not understand man, the only being who understands. These two temptations are aided by two of man’s most noble arts: poetry and mathematics. Both of these arts are necessary and useful, but both tend to emancipate themselves from philosophy and re-enforce the hostility to it. Dialectic, the art of friendly conversation, as practiced by Socrates, is this combination of daring and moderation.In the decisive respect the city is not natural: it cannot comprehend the highest activity of man. In the light of the splendor of the soul’s yearning after the whole, the city looks very ugly. This is the true comedy-taking the city with infinite seriousness, beautifying it with every artifice, making it a veritable Callipolis, and then finding that compared to the soul which was supposed to be like it, it is a thing to be despised. This fair city, the goal of so many aspirations, now looks like a cave, and its happy citizens like prisoners; it is comparable to the Hades of which Achilles complained, and the attachment to it is a species of folly. From the point of view of the city, the philosopher looks ridiculous; but from the point of view of the whole, the citizen looks ridiculous.What then was the use of spending so much time and effort on a city that is impossible? Precisely to show its impossibility. This was not just any city, but one constructed to meet all the demands of justice. Its impossibility demonstrates the impossibility of the actualization of a just regime and hence moderates the moral indignation a man might experience at the sight of less-than-perfect regimes. The extreme spirit of reform or revolution loses its ground if its end is questionable. If the infinite longing for justice on earth is merely a dream or a prayer, the shedding of blood in its name turns from idealism into criminality. The revolutions of Communism or Fascism are made in the name of perfect regimes which are to be their consequence. What matter if a few million die now, if one is sure that countless generations of mankind will enjoy the fruits of justice? Socrates thinks about the end which is ultimately aimed at by all reformers or revolutionaries but to which they do not pay sufficient attention. He shows what a regime would have to be in order to be just and why such a regime is impossible. Regimes can be improved but not perfected; injustice will always remain. The proper spirit of reform, then, is moderation. Socrates constructs his utopia to point up the dangers of what we would call utopianism; as such it is the greatest critique of political idealism ever written. The Republic serves to moderate the extreme passion for political justice by showing the limits of what can be demanded and expected of the city; and, at the same time, it shows the direction in which the immoderate desires can be meaningfully channeled. At the beginning of the dialogue, Glaucon and Adeimantus set the severest standards for political justice. In order to try to meet those standards, they would have to establish a terrible tyranny and would fail nevertheless. Socrates leads them first to the fulfillment of their wishes, and then beyond, to a fullfillment which does not depend on the transformation of human nature. The striving for the perfectly just city puts unreasonable and despotic demands on ordinary men, and it abuses and misuses the best men. There is gentleness in Socrates’ treatment of men, and his vision is never clouded by the blackness of moral indignation, for he knows what to expect of men. Political idealism is the most destructive of human passions.The thinkers of the Enlightenment, culminating in Marx, preserved Socrates’ ultimate goals but forgot his insistence that nature made them impossible for men at large. Only by distorting or narrowing man’s horizon can the permanent duality in his nature be overcome.In the case of most citizens, the philosopher’s concern is only that he do them no harm, and his justice thus has the character of a burdensome duty. In the case of the promising young, he is concerned with doing them a positive good, and his justice has the character of love. A philosopher must always carry on a contest with the city for the affections of its sons. Although he has a duty to the city, he is always at war with it. 第8-9卷 (543a-569c) The regime is identical with the class, or kind, of men who hold the ruling offices. As this class varies, so does the way of life of the city. The regime determines the character of law, education, property, marriage, and the family. The different kinds of regime are distinguished by their explicit goals, which derive from the ways of life men can choose. Truly different re... 2019-03-15 10:53  2人喜欢 第8-9卷(543a-569c)The regime is identical with the class, or kind, of men who hold the ruling offices. As this class varies, so does the way of life of the city. The regime determines the character of law, education, property, marriage, and the family.The different kinds of regime are distinguished by their explicit goals, which derive from the ways of life men can choose. Truly different regimes, and men, stem from significant and irreducible differences of principle. Socrates suggests that wisdom, honor, money, freedom, and love are the ends which men pursue and for which they can use the political order; the dominance of one principle or another brings forth very different dimensions in the lives of men. The healthy soul is the standard for the judgment of regimes and the key to understanding them; the healthy regime is the one that allows for the development of healthy souls. Such a political science is more akin to medicine than to mathematics. Political science must be evaluative; just as a doctor must know what a healthy body is, a political scientist must know what a healthy regime is. Such a political science provides a much richer and more comprehensive framework than that provided by our contemporary political science with its oversimplified dichotomies, democratic versus totalitarian or developed versus underdeveloped.Socrates presents political life in this way with the intention of benefiting Glaucon and Adeimantus. He is in the process of leading them back to the level of ordinary political life after their brief ascent toward the sun. They must live in the city, as must most men. But Socrates wishes them to see the city in the light of what they have learned in their ascent; their vision of their world must be transformed. Adeimantus must no longer see philosophy as an enemy of the city, and Glaucon must no longer be tempted by tyranny. Socrates accomplishes this by taking the highest kind of individual and constructing a regime around him. He thus appeals to Adeimantus, by giving political status to that human type, and to Glaucon, by showing him a ruler for whom the practice of justice appears to be an unqualified good. The young man who wishes to live well will pray for that city and its way of life. But this ultimately means that he will, in the absence of that regime, desire to live a private life, for that good life is shown to be possible without the regime; it does not depend, as do the other ways of life, on ruling in the city. It is self-sufficient and always available to him who chooses it. Socrates’ political science, paradoxically, is meant to show the superiority of the private life. The most important point made in this section is that while the best city exists only in myth, the best man exists actually.Glaucon, in his first speech on justice, asserted that a thing could be understood by its origin, or that its origin is its nature. Socrates taught, in the discussion of the ideas, that the end, not the origin, of a thing is its nature.The preoccupation with the acquisition of property and the difficulties involved in its distribution make it impossible for the city to devote itself to the good use of that property or, simply, to the good life. The body cannot be forgotten, and thus it is impossible to renounce everything connected with private property and concentrate only on the soul. The possession of private property is the crucial change from the best regime to the second best, and all the ills which beset the various regimes follow from that change. The city’s primary business becomes the management of property and is, hence, the dedication to mere life.(571a-592b)It will be noted that Socrates makes the choice between tyranny and philosophy depend on pleasure.This choice between the philosophic and tyrannic lives explains the plot of the Republic. Socrates takes a young man tempted by the tyrannic life and attempts to give him at least that modicum of awareness of philosophy which will cure him of the lust for tyranny. Any other exhortation would amount to empty moralism.In the Republic Socrates has included both god and beast in the city, and this accounts for the difference between his political science and Aristotle’s. Socrates, unlike Aristotle, makes eros a political principle. Although tyranny and the tyrannic man are in one way the furthest from philosophy, they are in another the nearest to it. This is why Socrates is attracted to those dangerous young men, the potential tyrants, who are products of the democracy. With some of these young men (for example, Critias and Alcibiades) his training failed, and as a result he was condemned. But with others (for example, Xenophon and Plato) he succeeded, and they have exculpated him.It is clear that happiness does not depend on anything tyranny can acquire. Glaucon’s notion of the good things has been altered by the marvelous things he has experienced in this conversation. Previously he thought that both just and unjust man desired the same things; now he sees the possibility of a life—the life of Socrates—which is self-sufficient and happy. The needfulness of tyranny has become questionable, and Glaucon will never again be able to pose the problem as he once did. Happiness is not connected with the exploitation of other human beings. At last man can break from the earthly city, and Glaucon has gained an inner freedom from its claims and its charms.第10卷(595a-608b)Poetry is necessary to Socrates’ project of reforming Glaucon, but it must be a new kind of poetry, one which can sustain Glaucon in a life of moral virtue and respect for philosophy. It is not, then, that poetry must be entirely banished but that it must be reformed.The text for Republic, Book X, is Odyssey, Book XI, the account of Odysseus’ visit to the dead. The difference between Odysseus’ experiences among the dead and those of Er is an indication of what Socrates is trying to teach. Er found rewards and punishments for just and unjust souls; but, more important, he also found an order of the universe which makes this world intelligible and provides a ground for the contemplative life. At the source of all things, Er saw that soul is the first principle of the cosmic order; hence the proper study of the universe is the study of the soul. What is best in man is not in conflict but in harmony with the nature of things.Socrates outlines a new kind of poetry which leads beyond itself, which does not present man’s only alternatives as tragic or comic, which supports the philosophic life. He gives the principle which Aristotle developed in the Poetics, and which is embodied in the works of men such as Dante and Shakespeare. It is still poetry, but poetry which points beyond itself.Poetry is essentially comprehensive or synoptic, and this distinguishes it from the special arts. The poem is a collection of imitations, but it is informed by the vision of the poet, a vision that transcends the level of the special arts.The ordinary standards for judgment of the worth of an activity or depth of wisdom are not applicable to Homer or himself. Wisdom has another source than art, and there is another kind of relation to the ideas than that of the artisan. A wise man is judged, not by any deed that he performs, but by the quality of his knowledge. And that knowledge is not like that of the artisan who produces something which can be used and who deals with a special subject matter. Wisdom is sought for its own sake, and it is comprehensive, interrelating the various arts and their products. Both Homer and Socrates in some way possess this kind of knowledge; they both have a view of the whole. Homer produces a product as the artisans do, but that product is distinguished from the artisans’ products in that it reflects a view of the whole, and its maker is by his very nature a man who must reflect on the whole.What Socrates implicitly criticizes Homer for is that he cannot explain the grounds for that view of the whole or for the way of life devoted to knowing it. Homer appears as a celebrator of heroes, of men of action, and hence as their inferior. Speech seems to be subordinate to deed. Nothing in the Homeric poems indicates the dignity of the poet; there are no heroes who give an account of the poet’s own doings, nor is there a picture of a universe which makes it possible to comprehend the possibility of wisdom. Socrates accuses Homer of not reflecting on himself, and hence making a world in which there is no place for himself.Only the legislator oversees the whole; and by looking to the legislator, the artisans know what the purpose or end of their products is. There is no idea which the legislator can look to and imitate mechanically; his art comprises wisdom entire. The user’s art is political science, of which Socrates is the founder.What Socrates stresses is that there is nothing in the poet’s art which impels him to the discovery of what is truly natural and much that inclines him to serve convention. Poetry tends to blend the natural and conventional elements in things; and it charms men in such a way that they no longer see the seams of the union of these two elements.Homer knows only that part of nature which causes men to laugh or cry, the part that makes human life appear either ridiculous or miserable. The man overwhelmed by pity and fear is the man least of all able to forget himself and his own, and hence the things that will protect him and give his life meaning. Most of all, he looks to the laws and the gods, and his pity can well make him a fanatic. The natural passions of men which Homer knows and appeals to are those that most attach a man to convention and hence to bondage in the cave. And the Homeric gods are such as to encourage and satisfy the pitying part of man’s soul.The overcoming of the attachment to one’s own is a monstrous endeavor, and the passions served by poetry rebel against it; but that endeavor is necessary to philosophy. This, then, is the essence of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry. Socrates banishes poetry once more, but this time offers it a return if it can learn to argue, to justify itself before the bar of philosophy. He points the way to Aristotle’s understanding of tragedy as a purgation of the passions of pity and fear rather than their satisfaction. Such tragedy would prepare a man to be reasonable and moderate after having purged those terrible passions; it would pay due attention to man’s necessary love of his own, but would temper it in such a way as to allow him some freedom from it. Thus tragedy would neither give way to these passions nor deny their existence. It would then be an important part of the education of decent, unfanatic men. Poetry will return, but only after having learned to subordinate itself, to mitigate its unguided tendencies toward indulgence and fanaticism. When the poets depict the gods they must no longer look to laughter and pity but to the ideas.(608c-621d)The most characteristic part of Socrates’ teaching is that soul is irreducible and that it is somehow the principle of the cosmos.The Republic, which seems to give a completed teaching about politics and the soul, ends with a return to philosophic doubt, to the conviction that one’s opinions are open to unanswered, if not unanswerable, questions.The myth of Er also makes clear that the civic virtues do not suffice for a man’s salvation for all eternity, and that, unless he has philosophized on earth, this voyage will profit him nothing. For each man must choose a new life, and that new life will determine whether he will fare well or ill in his next thousand-year sojourn among the dead; the correct choice of a life depends on knowledge of the soul, not on the practice of moral virtue. Those who have been rewarded for moral virtue in the afterlife are less well prepared than are those who have been punished to make the proper choice of life. We see a decent man, one like Cephalus, who has just come from his rewards, choose a tyrant’s life; for only law and convention had kept him in bounds in his earlier life, and his real view of happiness led him to envy tyrants. He has learned nothing in the afterlife; there is apparently no philosophy in the afterlife for those who did not practice it on earth; the soul is not perfected by the separation from the body. For all men other than the philosopher, there is a constant change of fortune from happiness to misery and back. The myth attributes full responsibility to men for what happens to them and thus teaches that there is no sin but ignorance.The teaching of this myth is a strictly human one—man in this life, without being other worldly—can attain self-sufficient happiness in the exercise of his natural powers and only in this way will he partake of eternity to the extent a human being can do so. Otherwise stated, only the philosopher has no need of the myth. (449a-473c) Women, family, and philosophy are all of the domain of the erotic, which seems to be what is most intransigently private. If the perfection of the city cannot comprehend the perfection of the soul, the city will look ugly in comparison to the soul’s beauty and be a proper subject of comedy; its pretensions will be ludicrous. This is part of Socrates’ attempt to politicize the erot... 2019-03-15 09:50  1人喜欢 (449a-473c) Women, family, and philosophy are all of the domain of the erotic, which seems to be what is most intransigently private.If the perfection of the city cannot comprehend the perfection of the soul, the city will look ugly in comparison to the soul’s beauty and be a proper subject of comedy; its pretensions will be ludicrous.This is part of Socrates’ attempt to politicize the erotic, to act as though it made no demands that cannot conform to the public life of the city. Shame is an essential component of the erotic relations between men and women. The need for overcoming shame becomes clear in relation to what Socrates considers to be another form of eros—intellectual or philosophic eros. Souls, in order to know, must strip away the conventions which cover their nature. Shame prevents them from doing this just as it prevents them from stripping their bodies.The character of the women in a society has a great deal to do with the character of the men; for when the men are young, the women have a great deal to do with their rearing, and when they are older, they must please the women. In particular, women have a more powerful attachment to the home and the children than do men. They are involved with the private things which are likely to oppose the city. They characteristically do not like to send their sons off to war. Further, women have much to do with men’s desire to possess money. Women’s favor can be won by gifts, and they have a taste for adornment and public display. Women play a great role in the corruption of regimes, as will be shown in Books VIII and IX. If half the city is not educated to the city’s virtues, the city will not subsist. This is a city without homes, and the women have more to overcome if they are to accept it, for their natures lead them to love the private things most and draw the men to a similar love. They must share the men’s tastes, or they will resist the changes in the family Socrates is about to propose.He compares the city to a body all parts of which share the same pleasures and pains. This city does not attain to that degree of unity, however, for one thing cannot be made public: the body. Everyone’s body is his own. The minds could conceivably be made to think similar. But if a man stubs his toe, no other man can share his pain. Thus the unity of the city depends on that same forgetting of the body which has been a golden thread running through the whole discourse. The body is what stands in the way of devotion to the common good; it is the source of the desire and the need for privacy.Philosophy is essentially a private activity and that the city must always be ruled by prejudices. Moreover, from the example of the city in speech, a man would learn what he must overcome in himself in order to become a philosopher. Socrates forgets the body in order to make clear its importance.If philosophy is desirable, so are these efforts to conquer everything that attaches one to particularity. Socrates can contemplate going naked where others go clothed; he is not afraid of ridicule. He can also contemplate sexual intercourse where others are stricken with terror; he is not afraid of moral indignation. In other words, he treats the comic seriously and the tragic lightly. He can smile where others cry and remain earnest where others laugh. In the Symposium he says that the true poet must be both tragedian and comedian, implying that the true poet is the philosopher. Here he shows that the man who has both gifts must use them to oppose the ways the vulgar tragic and comic poets use them; he must treat the tragic lightly and the comic seriously, hence reversing their usual roles. The man who is able to do this is already a philosopher. In both cases, it is shame which must be opposed; for shame is the wall built by convention which stands between the mind and the light. The ordinary poetry appeals to that shame, accepting its edicts as law, while philosophic poetry overcomes it. Shame, in both the case of nakedness and that of incest, is spiritedness’ means of controlling eros for the sake of preservation and the city. The effect of that shame is pervasive and subtle, making the thinkable appear unthinkable. The mind requires heroic efforts in order to become aware of the distortions of its vision caused by shame and to overcome them.(473c-487a)Beginning from the common sense of political men and maintaining their perspective throughout, Socrates demonstrates that they must tolerate and encourage philosophy. This constitutes a defense of philosophy from the political point of view. Philosophy is necessary to this regime, to the best regime, because without philosophy the regime cannot find impartial rulers who have considered the proper distribution of the good things. In other words, the philosopher is the only kind of knower whose attention is devoted to the whole. Statesmen are always preoccupied with the here-and-now, but the interpretation of the here-and-now depends on some knowledge of the whole. If justice means giving each man what is fitting for him, a statesman must know what man is and his relation to the other beings.Socrates teaches that wisdom and political power are distinct. Their coming together can only be due to the coincidence that a man who is wise happens also to be a ruler, thus uniting the two things; nothing in their two natures leads the one to the other. Political power serves the passions or desires of the members of a city, and a multitude cannot philosophize. It may use the results of science or philosophy, but it will use them to its own ends and will thereby distort them. Moreover, the wise man by himself is more of a threat to a regime than a helper. Intellectual progress is not the same as political progress, and, because there is not a simple harmony between the works of the mind and the works of the city, the philosopher without power must remain in an uneasy relationship with the city and its beliefs. Enlightenment endangers philosophy because it tempts philosophers to sacrifice their quest for the truth in favor of attempting to edify the public; in an “enlightened” world, philosophy risks being made a tool of unwise and even tyrannical regimes, thus giving those regimes the color of reason and losing its function as the standard for criticism of them. Enlightenment also endangers the city by publicly calling into question its untrue but essential beliefs.The philosopher learns as other men love—simply because it seems good and an end in itself; as a matter of fact, learning is an erotic activity for him. Love of learning is another expression of man’s eros, of his longing for completeness. Such a man wants to know everything, aware that no part can be understood without being considered in relation to the whole. Socrates simply describes that rare but revealing phenomenon, the theoretical man, he who proves the possibility of disinterested knowledge. He is the man who can preserve his disinterestedness even in the difficult human questions which concern him most immediately, because he is more attracted by clarity than life, satisfaction of desire, or honor. The philosopher introduces to the city a dimension of reason that had not been discerned in the earlier discussion of it.Socrates defines the second salient characteristic of the philosopher: he is a lover of the one idea of each thing and not the many things which participate in the ideas, of being and not becoming, of knowledge and not opinion.The ideas are the permanent ones behind the changing manys to which we apply the same name. Thus they are the causes of the things seen and heard—causes not in the sense that they explain the coming-into-being of a particular thing but in the sense that they explain its character. The idea of man is the cause of a particular man’s being a man rather than a collection of the elements to which he can be reduced. The ideas, then, are the justification of the philosophic life. If there are no permanent entities, if everything is in flux, there can be no knowledge.In undertaking to look for justice, Socrates and his companions were looking for something real, which has a higher dignity than, and can act as a standard for, the imperfect justice which they found in men and cities. If there is not something like an idea of justice, their quest is futile.And it is in this quest for the universal principles that the theoretical man first meets the opposition of the unphilosophic men who make up a city. Unphilosophic men are loyal not to cities in general but to their own city; they love not men in general, but this particular man or woman; they are not interested in the nature of the species, but their own fates. However, all the things to which citizens are most passionately attached have a lessened reality in the eyes of the theoretical man; what is peculiar to these things, what constitutes their charm for the practical man, must be overcome in order to understand them. For the practical man the particular things to which he is attached are the real things, and he will resist any attempt to go beyond them to “the more general case,” which would destroy their character and his capacity to possess them as his very own. The city in speech of the philosopher comes into being only by depreciating Athens, and any other city in which men can live. To the philosopher the city in speech is more lovable and more real than any of the particular cities which are to him poor imitations of the city in speech. In order to love what is, he must be a man who does not have the same needs as other men; he must have overcome, at least in thought, his own becoming. For the theoretical man, particular things are real only insofar as they “participate” in the ideas. They are not but are like what is. Hence the practical men who love particular things make the mistake of taking a thing to be that which it is like. They thus dream their lives away, never laying hold of a reality. But they cannot be told this. They must be soothed and deceived, and it is questionable how far they can afford to be tolerant of the philosopher whose interests are so different and conflicting.Poetry, in its most common usage, adorns the particular and renders it more attractive, hence making it more difficult to transcend. It does so because it must appeal to audiences of men who cannot and do not wish to make that transcendence. It is thus an opponent of philosophy.The virtues connected with the city help to preserve the city and thereby its inhabitants; preservation, or mere life, is the goal. The virtues connected with philosophy aid in the quest for the comprehensive truth; the good life is the goal. Both goals make their demands, and those demands conflict. There are, then, two kinds of virtue: philosophic virtue and demotic, or vulgar, virtue.(503b-540c)Socrates introduces the new theme when he tells Adeimantus that the study of justice, far from being the most important subject, is worthless unless it is completed by another. The true science, to which the others are only ministerial, is the study of the good. This comes as a surprise to Adeimantus, who is totally devoted to the city. It is a step beyond the earlier recognition that the idea of justice transcends any possible city. In turn, the idea of justice is only one of many ideas, which are treated in the comprehensive study of the good.The erotic Glaucon is told that eros is the soul’s longing for completeness, to be full of being, to know everything which is. Philosophy, which was introduced as a means to actualize the city’s good and is being used as a means to discover the good, turns out to be the end, the human good.Why does Socrates insist that our situation is that of men who mistake images for realities? It would seem more sensible to say that we take objects too seriously, that we do not recognize the importance and superior reality of the causes or first principles. How can it be said that we are bound to the lowest level of the line? The answer seems to be that the cave is the city and that our attachment to the city binds us to certain authoritative opinions about things. We do not see men as they are but as they are represented to us by legislators and poets. A Greek sees things differently from the way a Persian sees them. One need only think of the question of nakedness as discussed in Book V, or the significance of cows to Hindus as opposed to other men, to realize how powerful are the various horizons constituted by law or convention. Legislators and poets are the makers of these horizons; or, to use the symbols of the cave image, they are the men who carry the statues and the other things the reflections of which the prisoners see. These objects are not natural; they are themselves images of natural objects produced with cunning art so as to look like their originals, but are adapted to serve the special interests of the artists. In other words, we do not see things directly, but through the opinions we are taught about them. Those opinions are not accurate reflections of nature but are adapted to serve the needs of the city. They are designed to make a man love his city, and therefore they have to invest the city with all sorts of special significance and have no basis in nature. The first and most difficult of tasks is the separation of what exists by nature from what is merely made by man.The divided line and the cave teach that there are two fatal temptations of the mind. The first is that of the men who insist on the significance of the images in the cave and constitute themselves as their defenders and hence the accusers of the philosophers. They are often men of very high intelligence who are forced to hate reason by their unwillingness to renounce the charm and significance of their particular experiences and those of their people. They are enemies of whatever leads in the direction of universality, of anything that would tend to break down the heterogeneity, the particularity and distinctiveness, of the ways to which they are attached. Their dominant trait is piety, which frequently turns into fanaticism. These men are among the leaders of peoples and are protectors of the people’s beliefs. This account of their nature acts as a corrective of the view that the people can easily be persuaded to accept philosophers as kings.The other great temptation is that of those who are too easily liberated and do not learn in the cave what must be learned about man and the soul. These men dwell on the third level of the line and are best represented by the mathematicians. They escape to a world of universality and are charmed by the competence of their reason to order and explain that world. The homogeneity of numbers which can apply to all things permits them to reduce all the particularities in the world to unities. They tend to forget the questionableness of their own beginnings or principles and the natural heterogeneity of the different kinds of things; they are forgetful of qualitative differences and, hence, of the ideas. As the pious men were hostile to the ideas because the ideas threatened the heterogeneity of their world, these competent men are hostile to the ideas because they threaten the homogeneity of their world. Such were the early philosophers who while watching the sky fell into holes, the men ridiculed by Aristophanes because their science could not understand man, the only being who understands. These two temptations are aided by two of man’s most noble arts: poetry and mathematics. Both of these arts are necessary and useful, but both tend to emancipate themselves from philosophy and re-enforce the hostility to it. Dialectic, the art of friendly conversation, as practiced by Socrates, is this combination of daring and moderation.In the decisive respect the city is not natural: it cannot comprehend the highest activity of man. In the light of the splendor of the soul’s yearning after the whole, the city looks very ugly. This is the true comedy-taking the city with infinite seriousness, beautifying it with every artifice, making it a veritable Callipolis, and then finding that compared to the soul which was supposed to be like it, it is a thing to be despised. This fair city, the goal of so many aspirations, now looks like a cave, and its happy citizens like prisoners; it is comparable to the Hades of which Achilles complained, and the attachment to it is a species of folly. From the point of view of the city, the philosopher looks ridiculous; but from the point of view of the whole, the citizen looks ridiculous.What then was the use of spending so much time and effort on a city that is impossible? Precisely to show its impossibility. This was not just any city, but one constructed to meet all the demands of justice. Its impossibility demonstrates the impossibility of the actualization of a just regime and hence moderates the moral indignation a man might experience at the sight of less-than-perfect regimes. The extreme spirit of reform or revolution loses its ground if its end is questionable. If the infinite longing for justice on earth is merely a dream or a prayer, the shedding of blood in its name turns from idealism into criminality. The revolutions of Communism or Fascism are made in the name of perfect regimes which are to be their consequence. What matter if a few million die now, if one is sure that countless generations of mankind will enjoy the fruits of justice? Socrates thinks about the end which is ultimately aimed at by all reformers or revolutionaries but to which they do not pay sufficient attention. He shows what a regime would have to be in order to be just and why such a regime is impossible. Regimes can be improved but not perfected; injustice will always remain. The proper spirit of reform, then, is moderation. Socrates constructs his utopia to point up the dangers of what we would call utopianism; as such it is the greatest critique of political idealism ever written. The Republic serves to moderate the extreme passion for political justice by showing the limits of what can be demanded and expected of the city; and, at the same time, it shows the direction in which the immoderate desires can be meaningfully channeled. At the beginning of the dialogue, Glaucon and Adeimantus set the severest standards for political justice. In order to try to meet those standards, they would have to establish a terrible tyranny and would fail nevertheless. Socrates leads them first to the fulfillment of their wishes, and then beyond, to a fullfillment which does not depend on the transformation of human nature. The striving for the perfectly just city puts unreasonable and despotic demands on ordinary men, and it abuses and misuses the best men. There is gentleness in Socrates’ treatment of men, and his vision is never clouded by the blackness of moral indignation, for he knows what to expect of men. Political idealism is the most destructive of human passions.The thinkers of the Enlightenment, culminating in Marx, preserved Socrates’ ultimate goals but forgot his insistence that nature made them impossible for men at large. Only by distorting or narrowing man’s horizon can the permanent duality in his nature be overcome.In the case of most citizens, the philosopher’s concern is only that he do them no harm, and his justice thus has the character of a burdensome duty. In the case of the promising young, he is concerned with doing them a positive good, and his justice has the character of love. A philosopher must always carry on a contest with the city for the affections of its sons. Although he has a duty to the city, he is always at war with it. (357a-367e) Bound by its ancestral laws and myths, the city, like Thrasymachus, does not raise the question of nature; in fact it hinders the question from arising. It wishes to give the accidents of this time and place the same status as the unchanging principles of all things. It presents a certain combination of nature and convention as the horizon within which its citizens must live and act... 2019-03-15 07:33  4人喜欢 (357a-367e)Bound by its ancestral laws and myths, the city, like Thrasymachus, does not raise the question of nature; in fact it hinders the question from arising. It wishes to give the accidents of this time and place the same status as the unchanging principles of all things. It presents a certain combination of nature and convention as the horizon within which its citizens must live and act. The first effort of philosophy or science was to sort out the various elements in our experience, to discover the true cause of lightning, eclipses, etc., by means of investigation unhampered by authority. Philosophy had to liberate itself from the weight of respectable opinion and to become aware of the existence of rationally comprehensible principles of the phenomena seen in the heavens; in other words, nature had to be discovered against the will of the city.Glaucon presents the political supplement to pre-Socratic natural philosophy: the city limits men in the pursuit of the good things, but its only justification for doing so is the need to preserve itself.Adeimantus reveals his deepest wishes by insisting that justice be easy and pleasant. It should in itself incorporate the advantages conventionally said to result from its practice. The poets promise just men great honors and sensual pleasures in this life and the next. Without making it quite explicit, Adeimantus longs for justice itself to be like or to be an adequate substitute for these honors and pleasures.We must first discover what a healthy city is and what a healthy soul is. The very coming to awareness of such a city and soul transforms and educates these young men.(369b-372e)Socrates suggests that the bodily desires are very simple and easy to satisfy. In this he is not unlike Rousseau in his opposition to Hobbes. The more complicated desires, the ones that cause the injustice of which Glaucon has spoken, are the result of a mixture of the desires of the body with the desires of the soul. Although the entrance of these desires connected with the soul serves to corrupt this first city, Socrates looks on them with more favor than does Rousseau, for they are the first manifestations of a longing for a natural perfection higher than that of the body.Glaucon’s desire to rule is the expression of an independently noble impulse which, if fully developed, would find its satisfaction only in contemplation and would wish to overcome the body’s desires in order to enjoy its own peculiar pleasure undisturbed. His passionate nature has been tutored by the common opinions about what is good and by the materialist philosophy of which he has heard. Glaucon is thus a dangerous man but also an eminently interesting and educable one. His desires lead him to despise law and convention; as long as his limitless desires have as their objects the things he lists as desirable in his speech, he will long for tyranny. But it is precisely this freedom from law and convention combined with his passion that may enable him to climb to the human peaks. As is the case with all the young men most attractive to Socrates, Glaucon has a potential for good or evil. With Glaucon, we have the opportunity of seeing how Socrates educates and his effect on the young. He undertakes a perilous activity but one full of promise.Socrates fulfills the harsh conditions Glaucon set for the just man, but also lives in great pleasure. He does not live without the ordinary pleasures because he is an ascetic, but because the intensity of his joy in philosophy makes him indifferent to them. Once Glaucon can see the possibility of such a way of life he will be cured of his desire for tyranny.The solution to the political problem embodied in Adeimantus’ city is not a human one. A human solution requires the emancipation of desire, for only then can virtue arise. Humanity requires a self-overcoming; not because life is essentially struggle, but because man’s dual nature is such that the goods of the soul cannot be brought to light without the body’s being tempted and, therefore, without a tyranny of soul over body.(372e-376c)War is requisite to the emergence of humanity; as the city of sows was gentle and reflected a fundamental harmony among men, so the city of warriors is harsh and reflects a fundamental conflict among men. Paradoxically this is the first human city. A city cannot claim that it does not harm other men; its justification can only be in the quality of life it provides for its citizens.血气Spiritedness is a difficult motive to understand, and its character can only be seen by contrasting it with desire. Desires are directed to the satisfaction of a need: they express an incompleteness and yearn for completeness. Hunger, thirst, sexual desire, etc., are all immediately related to a goal and their meaning is simple. The goal of spiritedness is much harder to discern. Its simplest manifestation is anger, and it is not immediately manifest what needs are fulfilled by anger. Spiritedness seems characterized more by the fact that it overcomes desire than by any positive goal of its own. Moreover, the desires related to the body—which are the only ones that have appeared thus far—all have a self-preservative function, whereas spiritedness, on the contrary, is characterized by an indifference to life. It may indeed aid in the preservation of life, but it can just as well place honor above life. The city may exist for the sake of life, but it needs men who are willing to die for it.Spiritedness really represents a new part of the soul, one which will rule the desires and establish a principle of hierarchy in the soul. Warriors’ services cannot be measured by money, for money is a standard for evaluating the contributions made toward the satisfaction of desire or the preservation of life. Spiritedness is beyond the economic system. Only men who pursue self-preservation and the gratification of bodily desire can be counted on to act according to the principles of economic “rationality.”However that may be, the city needs defenders, and it also now needs rulers, for its feverish desires make living together impossible without control.Socrates most surprisingly draws the conclusion that the good guardian is possible if, in addition to being spirited, his nature is philosophic. In a book famous for the proposal that philosophers be kings, this is the first mention of philosophy or philosophers. Philosophy is invoked in the city only for the purpose of solving a political problem.The philosophers are gentlemen because they pursue knowledge and not gain; their object does not entail exploitation of others. The love of knowledge is a motive necessary to the rulers of this city in order to temper their love of victory and wealth. But the philosophers are the opposites of the dogs inasmuch as they are always questing to know that of which they are ignorant, whereas the dogs must cut themselves off from the unknown and are hostile to foreign charms. They love their own and not the good. And this must be so, for otherwise they would not make the necessary distinction between their flock and those who are likely to attack it. The warrior principle is doing good to friends and harm to enemies. It is true that their love of the known extends their affections beyond themselves to the city; it partakes of the universalizing or cosmopolitan effect of philosophy. But that love ends at the frontier of the city. They remain the irrational beasts who love those who mistreat them as well as those who are kind to them. No mention is made of the fact that dogs do not characteristically love the flocks but the masters to whom the flock belongs and who teach them and command them to care for the flock. These dogs as yet have no masters and are therefore incomplete. The masters whom they will know and hence love are philosophers and knowers. The dogs’ nature opens them to the command of philosophy but does not make them philosophers.(376c-383c)Courage, moderation, and justice—three of the four cardinal virtues defined in the Republic—are each mentioned in the context of the critique of poetry, but the fourth, wisdom, is not. It would seem necessary to infer that the warriors are not to be wise and that the beliefs about the gods are their substitute for wisdom. Those beliefs about the gods are a nonphilosophic equivalent of knowledge of the whole. The first segment of the study of poetry constitutes, therefore, a theology, a theology not true but salutary. Its doctrines are simple: the gods are good; they are the cause of the good; and they do not deceive.Gods must be good and can only cause good; the deeper teaching implied here is that the good is the highest and most powerful principle of the cosmos. As opposed to the earlier views of the first things which the poets express, chaos is not the origin of all things; and the universe is fundamentally a cosmos, not a battlefield of contrary and discordant elements, as the poets represent it to be in their terrible tales of the family lives and wars of the gods.Statesmen require a human prudence in which the gods can give them no guidance. This reform of the poetic account of the gods leads to the consequence that in the future the poetic depictions of the gods cannot serve as models for human conduct.(386a-392c)阿基里斯Socrates brings Achilles to the foreground in order to analyze his character and ultimately to do away with him as the model for the young. The figure of Achilles, more than any teaching or law, compels the souls of Greeks and all men who pursue glory. He is the hero of heroes, admired and imitated by all. And this is what Socrates wishes to combat; he teaches that if Achilles is the model, men will not pursue philosophy, that what Achilles stands for is inimical to the founding of the best city and the practice of the best way of life. Socrates is engaging in a contest with Homer for the title of teacher of the Greeks—or of mankind. One of his principal goals is to put himself in the place of Achilles as the authentic representation of the best human type. One need only look at their physical descriptions to recognize that they are polar opposites. Socrates is attempting to work a fantastic transformation of men’s tastes in making the ugly old man more attractive than the fair youth.With his analysis of Achilles, Socrates is actually beginning a critique of the courage based on spiritedness which is thus also a critique of the warrior class of his city. The surface presentation of spiritedness and spirited men in the Republic is that they are easily educable and can become the foundation of the good city. This is a necessary presupposition of the good city. But beneath that surface runs a current which shows that spiritedness is a most problematic element of the soul and the city, and that the good city is hence most improbable.Spiritedness first appeared in the city as the means to protect its stolen acquisitions. And this is a key to the nature of spiritedness: it is very much connected with the defense of one’s own.Anger is unreasoning and can easily mistake its sense of injustice for the fact of injustice. Anger is always self-righteous; it is at the root of moral indignation, but moral indignation is a dangerous and, although necessary, often unreasonable and even immoral passion. The tendency of anger is to give the color of reason and morality to selfishness. This has been revealed by the only character in the dialogue who has expressed anger; Thrasymachus’ anger defends the city’s own against philosophy when philosophy threatens the city’s injustice. Spiritedness is the only element in the city or man which by its very nature is hostile to philosophy.Philosophy leads to lack of concern with one’s own; it is concerned with things that are not threatened, that exist always. The activity of philosophy—the soul’s contemplation of the principles of all things—brings with it a pleasure of a purity and intensity that causes all other pleasures to pale. Philosophers need not live according to myths which assure the permanence and significance of things which are not permanent or significant. Death is overcome by a lack of concern with one’s individual fate, by forgetting it, in the contemplation of eternity.(392c-403c)Poets must appeal to and flatter the dominant passions of the spectators. Those passions are fear, pity, and contempt. The spectators want to cry or to laugh.(403c-412b)In the city of sows, the harmony of public and private interest was insured by the simplicity of desire, natural plenty, and the skill of the arts. Once desire has been emancipated, the virtue of moderation—understood as the control of spiritedness as well as desire—is used to re-establish that harmony.(412b-416d)In the Socratic view, political justice requires that unequal men receive unequal honors and unequal shares in ruling.All unjust conventional inequalities must be overcome without abandoning the respect for the inequality constituted by differences in virtue. The difficulty, of course, stems from private interest and property. The more powerful always want to have more, and the weaker are willing to settle for equality. It is not easy to make men without virtues see and accept their inferiority and give up hopes of rising. Reason and sentiment demand a solution by means of which men get what they deserve. But in all actual regimes there are one of two practical solutions: there is a hierarchy, but one that mixes nature with convention by making ruling depend on some more easily recognized and accepted title than virtue; or there is no standard or hierarchy at all. Each solution reflects a part of the truth, but each is incomplete.The lie, because it is a lie, points up the problems it is designed to solve. In any event, the character of men’s desires would make it impossible for a rational teaching to be the public teaching. Today it is generally admitted that every society is based on myths, myths which render acceptable the particular form of justice incorporated in the system. Socrates speaks more directly: the myths are lies.The noble lie is precisely an attempt to rationalize the justice of civil society; it is an essential part of an attempt to elaborate a regime which most embodies the principles of natural justice and hence transcends the false justice of other regimes. The thoughtful observer will find that the noble lie is a political expression of truths which it itself leads him to consider. In other words, there are good reasons for every part of this lie, and that is why a rational man would be willing to tell it.The Socratic teaching that a good society requires a fundamental falsehood is the direct opposite of that of the Enlightenment which argued that civil society could dispense with lies and count on selfish calculation to make men loyal to it. The difference between the two views can be reduced to a difference concerning the importance of moderation, both for the preservation of civil society and for the full development of individual men’s natures. The noble lie is designed to give men grounds for resisting, in the name of the common good, their powerful desires. The great thinkers of the Enlightenment did not deny that such lies are necessary to induce men to sacrifice their desires and to care for the common good. They were no more hopeful than Socrates concerning most men’s natural capacity to overcome their inclinations and devote themselves to the public welfare. What they insisted was that it was possible to build a civil society in which men did not have to care for the common good, in which desire would be channeled rather than controlled. A civil society which provided security and some prospect of each man’s acquiring those possessions he most wishes would be both a more simple and more sure solution than any utopian attempt to make men abandon their selfish wishes. Such a civil society could count on men’s rational adhesion, for it would be an instrument in procuring their own good as they see it. Therefore moderation of the appetites would be not only unnecessary but undesirable, for it would render a man more independent of the regime whose purpose it is to satisfy the appetites.The Socratic response to this argument would be twofold. First, he would simply deny the possibility of a regime which would never be compelled to call for real sacrifices from its citizens. This is particularly true in time of war. Second, such a civil society can be founded only by changing the meaning of rationality. For this society, rationality consists in the discovery of the best means of satisfying desires. The irrationality of those desires must be neglected; in particular, men must neglect the irrationality of their unwillingness to face the fact that they must die, of their constant search for the means of self-preservation as if they could live forever.(419c-427c)The guardian who is totally devoted to the common good is the prototype of the philosopher who is devoted to knowing the good.In relation to its neighbors, the city is not motivated by considerations of justice but by those of preservation. Justice has to do with the domestic life of the city and cannot be extended beyond its borders. This is a point to be considered when examining the analogy between city and man: justice is supposed to be the same in both, so one would expect that a man should behave toward other men as does a city toward other cities.Adeimantus’ particular form of spiritedness, when tamed, is a scourge of injustice, a source of primitive justice.(427c-445e)Justice, in the city at least, means only the presence of the three other virtues: moderation, courage, and wisdom. 导论 The Republic is the true Apology of Socrates, for only in the Republic does he give an adequate treatment of the theme which was forced on him by Athens’ accusation against him. That theme is the relationship of the philosopher to the political community. Socrates is unjust not only because he breaks Athens’ laws but also because he apparently does not accept those fundamental beliefs wh... 2019-03-14 15:42  1人喜欢 导论The Republic is the true Apology of Socrates, for only in the Republic does he give an adequate treatment of the theme which was forced on him by Athens’ accusation against him. That theme is the relationship of the philosopher to the political community. Socrates is unjust not only because he breaks Athens’ laws but also because he apparently does not accept those fundamental beliefs which make civil society possible.We are likely to be misled by this apparent Socratic optimism concerning the best case—the regime where philosophers rule. Careful reading will reveal that this alleged harmony is more of a paradox than a solution, that it covers a host of tensions which come to light in the less than perfect cases. Socrates may well have reformed philosophy so that it was no longer indifferent to politics, but it was certainly no less subversive of all existing regimes than was the older philosophy. If philosophers are the natural rulers, they are the rivals of all the actual rulers. In fact, the Republic tacitly admits the truth of the charges made against Socrates: he is not orthodox in his beliefs about the gods and sets up new beings, the ideas, which are superior to the gods; the philosophers he trains will be men who both know the nature of things in the air and below the earth and are able to speak with consummate skill; and he teaches young men to despise Athens because he teaches them to love a regime in which philosophers are kings. Socrates denies that he is unjust because of this, but there must be a revolution in men’s understanding of justice for just deeds to be recognized as such. In all imperfect regimes, his presence is problematic, and he must behave prudently: he undermines the attachment to the regime and laws of the city, but he is the salvation of all those in it who wish to live the good life.The Republic is the first book which brings philosophy “down into the cities”; and we watch in it the foundation of political science, the only discipline which can bring the blessings of reason to the city. We will learn that the establishment of political science cannot be carried out without sacrifice of the dearest convictions and interests of most men; these sacrifices are so great that to many they do not seem worthwhile: one of the most civilized cities which has ever existed thought it better to sacrifice philosophy in the person of Socrates rather than face the alternative he presented. This is why philosophy needs an apology; it is a dangerous and essentially questionable activity. Socrates knew that his interests were not, and could not be, the interests of most men and their cities. We frequently do not see this and assume that his execution was a result of the blind prejudices of the past. Therefore we do not see the true radicalness of the philosophic life. Hostility to philosophy is the natural condition of man and the city.第一卷(327a-328b)Socrates will only give as much of himself as is required to regain his freedom. This situation is a paradigm of the relation of the philosopher to the city.Polemarchus sees him hurrying off and orders a slave to order him to stay. This little scene prefigures the three-class structure of the good regime developed in the Republic and outlines the whole political problem. Power is in the hands of the gentlemen, who are not philosophers. They can command the services of the many, and their strength is such that they always hold the philosophers in their grasp. Therefore it is part of the philosophers’ self-interest to come to terms with them. The question becomes: to what extent can the philosophers influence the gentlemen? It is this crucial middle class which is the primary object of the Republic and the education prescribed in it. In this episode, the first fact is brute force, leading to the recognition that no matter how reasonable one may be, everything depends upon the people’s willingness to listen. There is a confrontation here between wisdom, as represented by Socrates, and power, as represented by Polemarchus and his friends. At first the opposition of the two principles is complete, but Adeimantus and Polemarchus try to make Socrates choose to remain by offering him pleasant occupations if he does so. Glaucon accepts on behalf of his friend, and Socrates grudgingly gives in to the fait accompli. Hence wisdom and power reach a compromise, and a miniature community is formed. This accomplished, they take a vote and ratify their decision, and a new principle of rule emerges: consent. It is a mixture of powerless wisdom and unwise power. All political life will be founded on such compromises, more or less satisfactory, until the means can be discovered to permit the absolute rule of wisdom. Since he is forced to become a member of this community, Socrates soon establishes himself as its ruler by overcoming the other aspirants to the office, and then he proceeds to found a political regime in which philosophers will rule.(328b-331d)Having made their social contract, the members of the group go to Polemarchus’ house where they find his father, Cephalus, who dominates the scene, and who does so precisely because he is the father. Age is his title to rule, as it is in almost all regimes governed by ancestral custom. Age is a practical substitute for wisdom because, unlike wisdom, it is politically recognizable and easily defined. It is more feasible to teach force to respect age than to teach it to respect wisdom. The reverence for age, and hence antiquity, is one of the strongest ties which can bind a civil society together. But in order to carry on a frank discussion about justice, this reverence must be overcome, and the philosopher must take the place of the father at the center of the circle. Socrates must induce Cephalus to leave the scene, because Cephalus is beyond reason, and it would be impious to dispute him.Once authority has been banished, Socrates and his companions can begin a critical examination of the ancestral code, of the conventional view of justice. This is the burden of the rest of Book I. All traditional opinions are discredited; and unaided reason, free of limiting prejudices, can begin the search for an understanding of justice which is not merely opinion. This criticism is a destructive activity in the name of liberation. It is a perilous undertaking for men who must remain members of civil society and could not properly take place under the eyes of Cephalus. He stands for those restraints on body and soul which are essential to the preservation of the city. There are certain uncomfortable issues, the raising of which usually indicates an inclination to vice on the part of those who do so. The practice of posing the extreme questions is a bad one, for one of its necessary consequences is corruption of the habits of the virtues. The only justification for questioning the old way would be that as a result a new, superior, way which Cephalus does not know of might emerge. The ancestral is by its nature silent about its own foundations; it is an imposing presence that awes those who might be tempted to look too closely.Cephalus typifies the ancestral which cannot, but must, be questioned. Although his appearance is brief, by means of a few circumspect inquiries Socrates manages to reveal his character and his principles and, hence, those of the tradition he represents. Then the old man is delicately set aside. From the point of view of justice, eros is a terrible thing, a savage beast. For a man like Cephalus, life is always split between sinning and repenting. Only by the death of eros and its charms can such a gentleman become fully reliable, for his eros leads neither to justice nor philosophy but to intense, private bodily satisfaction. Characteristic of Cephalus and men like him is a salutary forgetting of the preconditions of their kind of life.Socrates’ procedure is quite strange. In the first place he says nothing about half of what interests Cephalus: he does not mention piety, whether this is because he thinks Cephalus’ understanding of piety is adequate or because he is not interested in piety. Second, in his discussion of paying one’s debts, Socrates is silent about the gods and the sacrifices owed to them. In a word, Socrates forgets the divine, which is Cephalus’ prime preoccupation, and makes the discussion one concerning human justice alone. This, along with his unwillingness to face the fact that he might be ignorant of the very obligations he is trying so hard to meet, is what causes Cephalus to leave. While the discussion is going on, he is elsewhere performing sacrifices to the gods, concerned with what is forgotten in that discussion.It becomes Polemarchus’ responsibility to explain what standard should be looked to when one deviates from the letter of the law—which is equivalent to stating the purpose for which laws are instituted.(331d-336a)The relation between justice conceived as one’s own good and justice conceived as the common good is the abiding concern of the Republic; Cephalus and Polemarchus represent the two poles. Also at this point, with the recognition that a man’s property in money only extends so far as he can use that money well—only so far as is good for him—private property becomes radically questionable.Every nation has wars and must defend itself; it can only do so if it has citizens who care for it and are willing to kill the citizens of other nations. If the distinction between friends and enemies, and the inclination to help the former and harm the latter, were obliterated from the heart and mind of man, political life would be impossible. This is the necessary political definition of justice, and it produces its specific kind of human nobility expressed in the virtue of the citizen. Socrates does not simply reject it as he appears to do. The warriors in his best regime, whom he compares to noble dogs, share in the most salient characteristic of noble dogs: gentleness toward acquaintances and harshness toward strangers. This is the key to the strengths and weaknesses of the political man.Socrates and Polemarchus discover that the world is divided up among the arts and there is nothing left for an art of justice. A doctor may do good to his friends and hence be just, but justice is nothing beyond the exercise of his art, which is something other than justice. Arts are the means of doing good and harm; arts have subject matters but justice does not; hence justice is not an art and cannot do good. Justice has disappeared. Moreover, Socrates insists on pointing out that the arts are neutral, that they can effect opposite results with equal ease. However that may be, the assumption that justice is an art does lead to serious difficulties, expressed ironically in the notion that the just man is both useless and a thief.The primary concern of the just man must be something Polemarchus has never considered: what counts is not so much the disposition to give the good things to friends, but knowing what those good things are. Justice must be some kind of knowledge. Justice necessarily and primarily demands a knowledge of what is good for man and the community; otherwise the knowledge and skills of the arts are in the service of authoritative myths.Artisans were content with their competence and closed to the larger questions. To be ignorant in Socrates’ way is to be open to the whole. The artisans are models of knowledge, but their kind of knowledge is not applicable to the domain of poets and statesmen. The problem is to combine the concerns of poets and statesmen with knowledge as artisans possess it. Such knowledge is what Socrates is seeking.The doctor can produce health, but that health is good he does not learn from medicine, and similarly with all of the arts. They deal with partial goods which presuppose a knowledge of the whole good to which they minister. The error of the discussion was to look for a specific subject matter for justice, to make it one among many arts, to act as though only the doctor had anything to say about medicine. To help a sick friend one needs not only a doctor but someone who knows to whom health is fitting and how many other goods should be sacrificed to it, and who can direct the doctor to do what will most help the patient. There are master arts which rule whole groups of ministerial arts and are necessary to them. These are what Aristotle calls architectonic arts. The carpenter, the mason, the roofer, etc.—all are in need of an architect if a house is to be produced. He is more important than they are, he guides them, and he does not need to be a carpenter, a mason, or a roofer himself. Without the architect, all the other arts connected with building lack an end and are useless or worse. Similarly, justice must be a master art, ruling the arts which produce partial goods so as to serve the whole good. In other words, justice must be knowledge of that good which none of the other arts knows but which each presupposes. Lawgivers actually organize all the arts and tell their practitioners what they can and cannot do. What Socrates proposes is a legislative or political science. If each of the artisans obeys the law established by a legislator who is wise in this science, he would be just, and justice would take care of itself in law-abiding practice of the arts. In this way the arts would provide what is fitting to each man. Hence Socrates teaches that in order to be just in the full sense one must be a philosopher, and that philosophy is necessary to justice.The poets and the laws tell Polemarchus the proper place of each thing, and this is why he sees no difficulty in doing good to friends. His is a prephilosophic world, and its authorities must be completely discredited before philosophy can even be sought. Polemarchus’ view is not merely a result of his laziness but a product of his attachment to family and city. He makes the primitive identification of the good with his own. Men who are outsiders can become friends only by becoming “naturalized” members of the family; blood ties are what count. Even the loyalty to the city is understood as an extension of the family. This tendency to see the good in one’s own and to devote oneself to it is one of the most powerful urges of human nature and the source of great devotion and energy. Once the distinction between what is good and one’s own is made, the principle of loyalty to family and city is undermined. In order to be just, one must seek good men wherever they may be, even in nations fighting one’s own nation. If the good must be pursued, then caring for one’s own must be extinguished, or it will make one unjust and impede the quest for the good. This undermines family and city; and they must attempt to prevent the distinction from even coming to light. Certainly, Polemarchus would regard the abandonment of his primary loyalties as the destruction of the purpose and dignity of his life. If, however, he is to be consistent with the argument, he must make this sacrifice. A man who wishes to be just must be cosmopolitan. Thus far, Socrates has led us to the observation that in order to do good to friends and harm to enemies one need only be a philosopher and give up one’s attachments to those whom most men call friends.With all of Polemarchus’ admiration for justice, it is not the highest thing, not sought for as such. Justice is more of a means to the end of preserving life and property than itself the end of a good life. Polemarchus’ definition of justice might be regarded as the rule requisite to the satisfaction of collective selfishness: be loyal to the members of your own group so that you can best take advantage of the outsiders. There is a tension in Polemarchus—of which he is unaware—be—tween his love of property and his love of justice. This is what Socrates exposes and what Thrasymachus is about to exploit.(336b-354b)Thrasymachus has stripped away the veils that covered the selfishness of the rulers and their laws. Those laws themselves serve the private interest of a part of the city and do harm to the rest of it. Laws are not directed to the common good. And yet the city will continue to put lawbreakers to death as unjust men and enemies of the common good. The anger awakened in men by the sight of indifference or hostility to law is a powerful force in protecting the law and hence the city, but it can also be the enemy of justice and is certainly the greatest enemy of philosophy. Thrasymachus, whose art gives speech to the passions of the city, is its agent in condemning Socrates, and his action in the service of this passion imitates the city’s action.When the poor, or the rich, or the old families, or a tyrant take over the rule in a city, its laws change correspondingly. The sovereign makes the laws, and those laws always happen to reflect its interests. Oligarchies make laws which favor and protect oligarchy; democracy makes laws which favor and protect democracy, etc. The regime is the absolute beginning point; there is nothing beyond it. To understand the kind of justice practiced in any city one must look to the regime. The laws have their source in the human, all too human. He who obeys them, in reverence or in fear, is simply serving the advantage of the stronger, whether the stronger is a single man, or the great majority of the people, or any other politically relevant group within the city. If this be the case, however, prudence and self-interest would seem to dictate to the individual that either he should try to evade the law or else become the lawmaker himself. Thrasymachus’ thesis is simply that the regime makes the laws and that the members of the regime look to their own good and not the common good. The city is not a unity but a composite of opposed parties, and the party which wins out over the others is the source of the law. There is no fundamental difference between tyranny and other regimes because they all have the same selfish end. Justice, therefore, is not a fundamental phenomenon; the lawgiver cannot base himself upon it, for justice is a result of law.Socrates does not deny that it is the stronger who rule and establish the law. He silently accepts the view that all existing regimes are as Thrasymachus says they are. The two men thus agree that the character of the ruling group is the core of politics, that the rulers are the stronger, and that justice is a political phenomenon and must be embodied in the laws of a city. The issue between them is whether all rulers, all lawgivers, must be selfish in the way Thrasymachus insists they are. From this point on the question is the regime—who rules; and Socrates tries to find a kind of man, a political class, which is both strong and public-spirited.Socrates turns, then, to the criticism of Thrasymachus’ view of the rulers. He quickly succeeds in embarrassing him by the reflection that sometimes rulers make mistakes; hence obedience to the law may be as much to their disadvantage as their advantage. Justice is not the advantage of the stronger unless the stronger (the rulers) know what their own advantage is. The emphasis now shifts from strength to knowledge.Like Polemarchus, Thrasymachus takes it for granted that the most common objects of desire—particularly whatever has to do wealth—are advantageous and that knowledge of them is a given. Thrasymachus is the more thoughtful voice of the most thoughtless opinions and desires. He wishes to educate a clever, selfish man who knows how to get what he wants.The city could hardly admit that its laws are essentially fallible. Its pronouncements must be authoritative, and all knowledge, divine or human, must be ratified and codified by the sovereign. It has a monopoly of wisdom. Otherwise every individual would have an appeal from it.Thrasymachus is not merely a lover of gain. He is also, in his way, a lover of knowledge. He is a model of that not uncommon phenomenon, “the intellectual.” His passions are in the service of things other than knowledge although he devotes himself to a life of knowledge. Knowledge is not pursued for the sake of knowledge, but he recognizes a certain superiority in the life devoted to knowing for its own sake. It is this contradiction that defeats him, for taking knowledge seriously leads beyond preoccupation with one’s private advantage toward a disinterested life devoted to universal concern.Thrasymachus, charmed by Socrates’ arguments, finally becomes his friend. The intellectual voice of the city can become tractable as the city never will. The Republic, a book about a perfect city, is characterized by having perfect interlocutors, that is, men without whom a city could not be founded and who are, at the same time, persuadable, whom argument can convince to adapt to a new kind of world which is contrary to their apparent advantage. Just as one must have almost unbelievable conditions to found the best city in deed, so one must have exceptional interlocutors to found it in speech.The wage-earner’s art is a kind of political substitute for philosophy. The intention of philosophy is to understand the nature of the arts and order them toward the production of human happiness, and to educate men to desire those things which most conduce to happiness. It can claim to rule all the arts for it alone tries to know the whole, the true whole, as opposed to the view of the whole of this time or place, and it restores the unity to a man’s life. It demands total dedication to its objects, as was required of the arts, while giving ample reward to its practitioner in that it is the perfection of his nature and his greatest satisfaction. Only in philosophy is there an identity of the concern for the proper practice of the art and that for one’s own advantage. Socrates embodies a solution to the conflicting demands which render Thrasymachus’ life meaningless: Socrates combines in a single way of life the satisfactions of the lover of knowledge and the lover of gain. All other lives are essentially self-contradictory. In the philosopher we can find both the public-spirited ruler and the satisfied man.In the character of civil society and the precariousness of human life and property there is a substantial basis for Thrasymachus’ observations which he has been unable to defend. Socrates, rather than refuting him, humiliates and punishes him.Everyone wishes to have a healthy soul. But what it consists in is the question. Is the man who obeys the laws of the community for the sake of ultimate gain precisely the same man as the one who is perfecting his soul? Are there not two definitions of justice implied here that have no necessary connection, so that the man who fulfills the commands of the one is not necessarily fulfilling the commands of the other and may even be contradicting them? As Socrates disarmingly admits, they have not defined justice but have wandered, their wandering has not been purposeless—they have not defined justice, but they have succeeded in defining the problem of justice. Justice is either what makes a city prosper or it is a virtue of the soul and hence necessary to the happiness of the individual. The question is whether the two possibilities are identical, whether devotion to the common good leads to the health of the soul or whether the man with a healthy soul is devoted to the common good.