The Republic - Noyemi

By Plato

may only arise out of the discordant elements which the philosopher
has attempted to unite in a single whole, perhaps without being
himself able to recognize the inconsistency which is obvious to us. 
For there is a judgment of after ages which few great writers have
ever been able to anticipate for themselves.  They do not perceive
the want of connection in their own writings, or the gaps in their
systems which are visible enough to those who come after them. 
In the beginnings of literature and philosophy, amid the first
efforts of thought and language, more inconsistencies occur than now,
when the paths of speculation are well worn and the meaning of words
precisely defined.  For consistency, too, is the growth of time;
and some of the greatest creations of the human mind have been wanting
in unity.  Tried by this test, several of the Platonic Dialogues,
according to our modern ideas, appear to be defective, but the
deficiency is no proof that they were composed at different times
or by different hands.  And the supposition that the Republic was
written uninterruptedly and by a continuous effort is in some degree
confirmed by the numerous references from one part of the work
to another.

The second title, "Concerning Justice," is not the one by
which the Republic is quoted, either by Aristotle or generally
in antiquity, and, like the other second titles of the Platonic
Dialogues, may therefore be assumed to be of later date. 
Morgenstern and others have asked whether the definition of justice,
which is the professed aim, or the construction of the State
is the principal argument of the work.  The answer is,
that the two blend in one, and are two faces of the same truth;
for justice is the order of the State, and the State is the visible
embodiment of justice under the conditions of human society. 
The one is the soul and the other is the body, and the Greek ideal
of the State, as of the individual, is a fair mind in a fair body. 
In Hegelian phraseology the State is the reality of which justice
is the ideal.  Or, described in Christian language, the kingdom
of God is within, and yet develops into a Church or external kingdom;
"the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens,"
is reduced to the proportions of an earthly building.  Or, to use
a Platonic image, justice and the State are the warp and the woof
which run through the whole texture.  And when the constitution
of the State is completed, the conception of justice is not dismissed,
but reappears under the same or different names throughout the work,
both as the inner law of the individual soul, and finally
as the principle of rewards and punishments in another life. 
The virtues are based on justice, of which common honesty in buying
and selling is the shadow, and justice is based on the idea of good,
which is the harmony of the world, and is reflected both in
the institutions of States and in motions of the heavenly bodies. 
The Timaeus, which takes up the political rather than the ethical
side of the Republic, and is chiefly occupied with hypotheses
concerning the outward world, yet contains many indications that
the same law is supposed to reign over the State, over nature,
and over man.

Too much, however, has been made of this question both in ancient
and in modern times.  There is a stage of criticism in which
all works, whether of nature or of art, are referred to design. 
Now in ancient writings, and indeed in literature generally,
there remains often a large element which was not comprehended
in the original design.  For the plan grows under the author's hand;
new thoughts occur to him in the act of writing; he has not worked
out the argument to the end before he begins.  The reader who seeks
to find some one idea under which the whole may be conceived,
must necessarily seize on the vaguest and most general. 
Thus Stallbaum, who is dissatisfied with the ordinary explanations
of the argument of the Republic, imagines himself to have found
the true argument "in the representation of human life in a State
perfected by justice and governed according to the idea of good." 
There may be some use in such general descriptions, but they can
hardly be said to express the design of the writer.  The truth is,
that we may as well speak of many designs as of one; nor need
anything be excluded from the plan of a great work to which the mind
is naturally led by the association of ideas, and which does not
interfere with the general purpose.  What kind or degree of unity
is to be sought after in a building, in the plastic arts, in poetry,
in prose, is a problem which has to be determined relatively to the
subject-matter. To Plato himself, the inquiry "what was the intention
of the writer," or "what was the principal argument of the Republic"
would have been hardly intelligible, and therefore had better be at
once dismissed.

Is not the Republic the vehicle of three or four great truths which,
to Plato's own mind, are most naturally represented in the form
of the State?  Just as in the Jewish prophets the reign of Messiah,
or "the day of the Lord," or the suffering Servant or people
of God, or the "Sun of righteousness with healing in his wings"
only convey, to us at least, their great spiritual ideals,
so through the Greek State Plato reveals to us his own thoughts
about divine perfection, which is the idea of good--like the sun
in the visible world;--about human perfection, which is justice--
about education beginning in youth and continuing in later years--
about poets and sophists and tyrants who are the false teachers
and evil rulers of mankind--about "the world" which is the embodiment
of them--about a kingdom which exists nowhere upon earth but is
laid up in heaven to be the pattern and rule of human life. 
No such inspired creation is at unity with itself, any more
than the clouds of heaven when the sun pierces through them. 
Every shade of light and dark, of truth, and of fiction which is
the veil of truth, is allowable in a work of philosophical imagination. 
It is not all on the same plane; it easily passes from ideas
to myths and fancies, from facts to figures of speech.  It is not

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"Injustice is censured because the censures are afraid of suffering, and not from any fear which they have of doing injustice."

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The Republic - Noyemi

By Plato

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