Plato's Republic by Rosen Stanley

Author:Rosen, Stanley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2005-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

4

So much for preliminaries. Now let us turn to Socrates’s exposition to Glaucon at 475e9. Socrates begins a bit abruptly, by establishing that the noble and the shameful (alternatively, the beautiful and the ugly) are each one thing, but taken as opposites (that is, as a two-term relation), they are two. “The same logos is true of the just and the unjust, the good and the evil, and all the forms (eidōn). Each is itself one, but by appearing everywhere in a community with deeds, bodies, and each other, each seems to be many” (476a4–7). This is the famous problem of the one and the many, which Socrates describes in the Philebus in more abstract and concise terms. An eidos, as has already been established by usage rather than analysis, is a family or kind that unites a collection of things each of which is the same such-and-such. The form is of course not itself the collection of particular instances but what each has in common with the other members of the collection. The instances of justice may differ in many ways from one another, but they are all the same with respect to the properties that qualify them for membership in the class of just things. It seems that the class or eidos itself cannot be included among just things; if it could be, we would generate a third-man argument, that is, we would require a metaclass of just things that includes the class itself as well as the members of the class, and so on indefinitely. This causes a number of difficulties for Socrates. For example, the class or form of beautiful things is also beautiful, and the same could presumably be said of the good. We have to find a way to speak, say, of the beauty of the Idea of beauty without dissolving the line between a class and its members. One possibility is to say that some forms exhibit the very property that they transmit to their instances. Good, beautiful, and just would be candidates for this way of speaking, whereas the form of the cow, for example, would not.

Socrates, however, is not now at that level of technical complexity. He makes the much simpler point that those who love sights and sounds love noble or beautiful instances of these, “but their discursive intelligence [dianoia] is unable to see and enjoy the nature of the beautiful itself” (476b6–8). He does not say that they are unable to see the form of sight or sound itself; to do so would make the discussion much too difficult for Glaucon. As it is, Glaucon raises no objection to references to the just, the beautiful, and the good in themselves. He has been prepared for these expressions by the long pursuit of perfect justice, that is, the paradigm of the just man. In everyday life, no one asks about the cow itself, only about cows and classes of cows (healthy, good milk givers, prime beef, and so on). But

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