Last week we left off with Socrates, along with Polemarchus, Adimantus, and Glaucon, going to the house of Cephalus, Polemarchus’ father, to have a conversation. We now meet the master of the house himself, as well as a number of other characters, most of whom do not speak in the course of the conversation. The key exception is Thrasymachus of Chalcedon. Thrasymachus was a noted sophist, an itinerant teacher of rhetoric, with conservative sentiments; his trademark was effective manipulation of his audience’s emotions. There is little apparent connection between the real-life person and the character in the Republic, but Thrasymachus’ name means “fierce in battle,” and that description matches the character perfectly.
The first man with whom Socrates converses, however, is Cephalus, an old man and wealthy but not an Athenian citizen. The bulk of the free population of Athens at this time consisted of metics, commonly understand as “resident foreigners,” but it is more correct to refer to them merely as non-citizens, seeing as metics could be born, live their whole lives, and die within the confines of Athens or the Piraeus. Polemarchus would eventually be granted Athenian citizenship, only to be murdered by the Thirty Tyrants on account of his inherited wealth.
Cephalus impresses Socrates as a man of virtue in a number of respects. For one, he both praises and practices the virtue of temperance, sophrosyne. He recounts a story of the playwright Sophocles, who in his old age being taunted for his declining virility replied that it was in reality a great blessing to be rid of troublesome passions. Cephalus has done well for himself financially, but he has managed to avoid becoming enamored of his own wealth. He praises justice, dikaiosyne, not only for the material rewards it has won him but also for the equanimity it has bought him as he approaches his final days and the prospect of reward or punishment in the hereafter looms ever larger in his mind. Cephalus is a pious man, and he breaks off conversation with Socrates to attend to public sacrifices; he demonstrates his wisdom by declining to bandy words with Socrates.
Polemarchus, heir to everything his father possesses, takes up the argument when Socrates inquires about the nature of justice. Cephalus had said that justice involves telling the truth and returning goods entrusted to you by another, but Polemarchus goes further and claims that this is the very definition of justice. As support for his claim, Polemarchus cites the poet Simonides, who wrote that justice is rendering to each person his due. Very quickly Socrates pokes holes in this simplistic definition of justice, so Polemarchus proffers a new one: justice consists of helping one’s friends and hurting one’s enemies. With this, too, Socrates dispenses, arguing that only injustice, not justice, can possibly harm anyone.
At this point Thrasymachus breaks in. He has noticed that although Socrates has gleefully deconstructed Polemarchus’ definition of justice, he has offered no actual definition of it himself. Thrasymachus wants Socrates to make a positive case, to go on and describe the essence of justice. Socrates, however, is too clever for Thrasymachus, flattering his intellect and goading his interlocutor into doing just what he demands of Socrates. Thrasymachus appears to realize that Socrates is playing with him, but his vanity and the encouragement of those nearby compel him to fall into Socrates’ trap.
Let’s pause here for a moment to consider exactly what this whole “discussion of justice” actually is. All parties except Socrates are operating on the assumption that the demands of justice are fairly clear and well-known, and they are seeking a principle which unites and gives coherent meaning to these various imperatives. That Socrates refuses to provide such a principle is what infuriates Thrasymachus and eventually induces Glaucon and Adimantus to issue their challenge in Book II. Polemarchus proposed two notions, first honesty and reciprocity, then helping one’s friends and hurting one’s enemies, on the authority of the wise men of yore; Thrasymachus now proposes his own principle based instead on observation of political reality. Socrates’ goal in this part of the Republic is merely to demonstrate the inadequacy of reliance on inherited maxims or empirical research.
The principle Thrasymachus proffers is that justice is “the advantage of the stronger.” By this Thrasymachus means that “the stronger,” the faction holding power in a city, legislates and determines what constitutes justice in their city with an eye, of course, toward their own advantage. Plato, our author, appears to be putting into Thrasymachus’ mouth an idea expressed by the sophist Protagoras, that justice is different in different places on account of differing laws and customs. In addition, Thrasymachus claims that un-punished injustice accrues more advantages than justice does because the unjust rob and defraud the just without repercussion.
Thrasymachus believes that he is adequately clear at every stage of his argument, but Socrates does not let him rest easy at any point. Socrates constantly presses Thrasymachus for a more precise statement of his position, much to Thrasymachus’ exasperation. Thrasymachus does not see the need for stating his opinion any more precisely because he figures that anyone with a brain will understand what he is saying without difficulty. He also proves a more wily debater than Polemarchus, calling, for instance, justice a vice and injustice a virtue when he realizes that the conventional answer would completely undercut his position. All the same, Socrates eventually gets the better of Thrasymachus, eventually forcing the famous sophist to blush.
At issue in the debate between Socrates and Thrasymachus is which of two rival notion of advantage is to be accepted. Thrasymachus conceives of advantage in a very concrete fashion, consisting of wealth, power, prestige, etc. Based on his own observations, Thrasymachus concludes that these goods accrue to those who hold power and who cheat others, a claim Socrates in no way contests. Rather, Socrates proposes that advantage truly consists of internal goods, in particular the proper ordering of faculties. In his discussion with Thrasymachus, Socrates elides this difference of opinion and uses the fact that he and Thrasymachus both use the same language to describe their notions of advantage to slowly drag his interlocutor out of his well-defended position and in the direction Socrates wants. Naturally enough, not everyone is convinced by Socrates’ rather underhanded debating tactics.
Another distinction Socrates elides is that between the Greek words dikaiosyne and dike, both translated into English as “justice” but referring to very different concepts. Dikaiosyne is the virtue of justice, a set of dicta that a good man obeys; dike is a cosmic force or principle. Socrates harks back to the ancient poets, Homer and especially Hesiod, and tries to bring their notion of cosmic justice down to earth, not in the sense of immanentizing the eschaton but in creating an isomorphism between cosmic justice and the virtue of justice. His great feat of imagination is to construct this isomorphism using the notions of political justice and a just state.
It is imperative to notice that what Socrates is doing is not new. Obviously, if Homer and Hesiod had similar ideas then they can’t be all that newfangled, but the Milesian philosopher Anaximander had also given a philosophical account of the same thing. What Socrates has accomplished in the Thrasymachus is the destruction of rival authorities: Polemarchus first appealed to the poets and wise men of yore; Tharsymachus then appealed to experience. Socrates demonstrates in the dialogue that neither of these sources of knowledge is adequate for truly comprehending justice. Philosophy, on the other hand, can do so, not simply by offering a descriptive account of justice but rather as a process leading to noetic understanding.
Exactly what this amounts to is what Socrates explains in the remainder of the Republic, but he lays the groundwork in the Thrasymachus.
