Philosophical Review

Plato on Justice and Power: Reading Book I of Plato's Republic by Kimon LycosReview by: Nickolas PappasThe Philosophical Review, Vol. 100, No. 3 (Jul., 1991), pp. 515-517Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2185087 .

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BOOK REVIEWS

The Philosophical Review, Vol. C, No. 3 (July 1991)

PLATO ON JUSTICE AND POWER: READING BOOK I OF PLATO'S REPUBLIC. By KIMON Lycos. Albany, N.Y., State University of New York Press, 1987. Pp. ix, 201. $39.50; $16.95.

Book I bears an uneasy relation to the rest of the Republic. Commen- tators frequently refer to the proposal that it had originally been a sepa- rate dialogue; and the fact that such a possibility even exists suggests the interpretive problems that Book I raises. It stands apart from the re- mainder of the dialogue in form (being much more dialogical and ex- ploratory), in the interlocutors who face Socrates, and most puzzlingly, in its analysis of justice. Not only are the theoretical foundations for Plato's definition of justice absent here (such as the theory of the soul, or of the Forms), but so is the analogy that fuels the entire dialogue, betweenjustice in a city and justice in a person. It would seem, then, that the work of the Republic is not begun until Book II; Book I at most shows how not to an- swer Thrasymachus's challenge to the value of justice.

Lycos writes in opposition to precisely this picture of Book I. His broad aim is to rehabilitate that book by showing its arguments to be more suc- cessful on their own than is commonly thought, not mere anticipations of the real arguments still to come (p. 2). And more narrowly, he wants to show that Socrates pursues a coherent strategy throughout Book I, a line of argument which not only anticipates, but even makes possible, the re- mainder of the Republic: The book's function "is to reshape thinking about justice in a certain direction" (p. 2).

That direction is away from a conventional, "external" perspective on justice, to a new "internal" one. Lycos means that, against a tradition of merely following social standards, Plato defines justice in terms of the "quality of mind" that produces it (p. 3). Moreover, "the features which constitute the capacity to be just are identical with, or are generative of, the power to render people good" (p. 156) (and, not incidentally, happy (p. 4)). That this is the Republic's conception of virtue is not news; nor is it news that Book I's arguments reflect that conception. The value of Lycos's point lies instead in his careful and often subtle documentation of this theme's emergence in Book I. As he details Socrates' argumentative strategy he brings order to what often seems a random set of arguments.

My chief dissatisfaction with this book concerns Lycos's two aims, as I have described them: he wants both to make the arguments work, and to show how they redirect the debate over justice. Although these broad and narrow aims share the motive of Book I's rehabilitation, they work against each other. For in his general attempt to save the arguments of Book I, Lycos claims so many of them to be effective as to make one wonder why

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BOOK REVIEWS

Plato found the rest of the Republic necessary; if these arguments work so well, the remaining nine books have not been rendered possible but made otiose. Lycos announces at the start that he will not focus on the argu- ments' validity (p. 6); but he often proceeds to do so anyway, and his ar- gument saving leads him to overlook patent flaws in Socrates' reasoning.

One example of this occurs in Lycos's reading (pp. 106-119) of the craft analogy Socrates uses against Thrasymachus (339b-342e). Because Thrasymachus has praised tyrannical rulers, Socrates argues that their rule, as a techno of rule, actually aims at the good of their subjects. Thrasy- machus is silenced by the argument, but that does not mean he should be. His main fault, I think, is that he understands ruling from the subjects' point of view-that is, as an activity defined primarily in terms of the subjects. Given this assumption, Socrates' craft analogy will work, for then everyone agrees that the ruler's subjects are the objects of the art of ruling. In reality, though, the object of that art is unclear. It seems more Thrasy- machean to me to describe ruling rather as the art of imposing power than as the art of organizing the subjects' lives. The imposition of power may well be a techno, just as boxing is; but as an activity of subjugation it implies no more concern than boxing does for the other's well-being. Socrates' argument here begs too many questions about the art of ruling to merit Lycos's defense of it as it stands. And since he does not need to make that defense to accomplish his narrower purpose, the effort distracts from the book's effect.

Lycos is at his best when he acknowledges weaknesses in Socrates' argu- ments, as when he grants that one argument works "dialectically" against Thrasymachus, but is unsound on its own terms (pp. 133-134). He is most careful in this way, and also most provocative, in one of the last sections of his book (pp. 120-136), in which he analyzes Socrates' re- sponse to Thrasymachus's praise of pleonexia (over-acquisitiveness). Soc- rates, says Lycos, moves from the old picture of justice as a brake on natu- ral greedy desires, to the idea that justice is an active impulse in its own right; thus "Socrates ingeniously retains the nexus between justice and the desire to excel. It allows justice to be a positive quality of mind" (p. 125). In this argument (349b-350c) Socrates uses the craft analogy not merely to score a point against Thrasymachus, but to bring to light an overlooked feature of intelligent behavior. Lycos's analysis in this section best accom- plishes his stated aims for the book.

Also noteworthy is Lycos's account of Socrates' interlocutors (pp. 21-70), within the context of conventional conceptions of justice in Athens. The description of Cephalus (pp. 26-31) in particular is more extensive and more deeply critical than discussions of him have typically been.

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Finally, though, I must mention a certain stiltedness of diction, and an unrelievedly abstract vocabulary, which make this a tiring book to read. The writing is not unclear, and so does not detract from the book's value as a reference; but as a thing to be read through it is much diminished by its expression.

NICKOLAS PAPPAS Hollins College

The Philosophical Review, Vol. C, No. 3 (July 1991)

PLATO'S THEORY OF EXPLANATION: A STUDY OF THE COSMO- LOGICAL ACCOUNT IN THE TIMAEUS. By ANNE FRIERE ASHBAUGH. Albany, N.Y., State University of New York Press, 1988. Pp. 195.

Interpreting Plato's Timaeus is a vertiginous business. The dialogue is dominated by a single speech by Timaeus which offers a grand cosmo- logical scheme-an eik-os muthos, a "likely story," a plausible myth. But this cosmology is preceded by a criticism of myth; how then are we to read the "likely story"? More generally, at Timaeus 27d ff. Timaeus sharply con- trasts the world of becoming and the world of being, of which becoming is an image. We have access to the changing world around us by perception -we grasp it by persuasion and belief-whereas the stable world of being is understood by pure reason. So any cosmology-an account of the na- ture of the changing world-will be a matter of belief and persuasion, not knowledge; and for that reason Timaeus's cosmology can only be a "likely story." How, then, are we to read the Timaeus as a work of philosophical analysis, rather than as the empty rhetoric for which Plato castigates the poets and the orators? And how is anyone ever to bridge the gap between the shady beliefs of this world of becoming and the luminous world of truth? This is the problem raised by the central books of the Republic and confronted in some of the critical works (for example, Parmenides 133b ff.; Sophist 248a ff.). In interpreting the Timaeus we need repeatedly to ask whether cosmology can ever be a philosophical project, as Plato under- stood philosophy to be, and whether Plato, in Timaeus's likely story, ac- knowledges that his own epistemology might be directly inimical to the process of dialectic.

Ashbaugh observes that the Timaeus bridges the contrast between rheto- ric and philosophy by means of the "likely story" (her rebarbative "veri- similar account"). So she argues that the rhetoric of Timaeus's account offers a cumulative or generative, rather than an analytic, explanation of the topic. Thus at each stage, not every thesis is explained; some are taken on trust for later accounting, at which point the coherence of the set of

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