Introduction to Plato's Republic | The New Thinkery Ep. 67

Welcome back to the new thinkery. I'm David Barr with me as always. This is my good friend Greg McBrayer. How are you?

How are you feeling, Greg? Not great, Bob. My old man has the has the vid. I'm sorry to hear that.

Do you know who this counter was? No, they gave it to him? No, I don't know. Not his own son, hopefully.

Well, I'm probably not, but I was around him all weekend. So yeah, but you're a young man of 20, Greg, I'm sure. Yeah, really my father's in the line around. Like a yeah, right.

Yeah, we'll see. We're doing the test tomorrow. We'll see. Hopefully, it's a negative.

He's got a lot of cool morbidities from his day shooting stack films. I still got a life left to live. Okay, I got a lot to give. You do.

You got a book to write. I'm going to call it becoming Socrates. Oh, I thought you were calling it the Hellenica. I'm still working on that.

I know, I know. I'm just getting sorry to announce. I'm doing well. I've got a book.

I'm writing called the Becoming Greg and it's all about becoming a corpse. I thought that we established a specially during our Tempest episode that Greg's a witch has been around for a few centuries. That's right. Small point of question.

A man witch is not called a man witch. A man witch is not called a witch. It's a warlock. So just keep a term straight there.

I'm a witch. I didn't know that Greg. That must be from your awesome Dungeons and Dragons days in college. What are we doing today?

We've been over a year. We've been around longer than Greg's beard. And we're doing the Republic. This is a political philosophy podcast.

It took us this long. I think there's some intimidation in talking about the Republic. Obviously, it's such a massive work and so much disgust. I was a little at least personally trepidaceous about taking it on.

How long have you guys been studying this book? How many times I remember talking to Greg when he was an undergraduate and he told me at that time, so this was around 2006, 2007. At that point in his life, he had studied the Republic over a dozen times, maybe 20 times, in that he could just rattle off his head to the fondest pagination of where things were in the text. So what's your number at now, Greg?

How many times have you studied it seriously? I don't know. Two or three dozen maybe. I've probably taught it.

Maybe a dozen times. Six or ten times. So do you now discover I'm using the book? This is the most famous philosopher of all time, probably Plato.

And this is his most famous work, the Republic. Do you encounter something new in the text every time you study it? Yes, unquestionably. And part of that is, I mean, part of that is because Plato is so rich and you can always find something new.

Part of that is because, honestly, because of the show and because of friends like Alex, Alex, Alex, the question I have. And I'll say, hey, I didn't think about this before and he'll say, well, did you think about this? And so he'll steer me the stuff that I hadn't paid attention to previously. And hopefully I could give him a little food for thought too on that.

But yeah, I mean, it's always something new. One of the most recent discoveries I think that I just I think I made was that I think the first book is really latching onto previous Greek accounts of justice in a very intentional way. So he's the homeer, for example, and then also this office. So yeah, I mean, I think it repays.

I'm just a little stuff, right? Like I, the last time I taught it, we're gonna talk about this a little bit. This is a dialogue that Socrates narrates to an unnamed comrade and question is always, who is so so so he's just telling this story about a conversation he had night before. And he recounts the entire story, supposedly verbatim.

And who's even telling the story to who's listening passively for two or three or four hours of the conversation? And I don't know who it is 10, 12 hours a day. It's 10 to 12. Fine.

I mean, so you're not your version. It's like 12 hours, right? So they're right. It's like half a day.

It's only a whole night at the point. Yeah. So I don't know, I don't know who's he speaking to, but a student made one point in passing that I thought, well, yeah, that's obviously right. Like, so it's commonly thought, well, maybe Plato was the person that's actually this all in this story too.

But he keeps Socrates keeps talking about this guy glaucon son of Ariston and who happens to be glaucon happens to be Plato's brother. So it'd be a little odd for Socrates to be telling a story to Plato where he's like, not saying your brother instead and saying instead this guy's son. So it's just a small small stuff like that. But bigger stuff as well, of course.

I think the more often I read it, the more radical I realize it is. And every time I've read it, I've thought, oh my God, it's even more radical than I thought it was last time. Alex? I mean, I sure like what do you mean by radical, like radical in the sense that Carl Copper thought it was a radical text?

Or what do you mean? For the folks at home, what does Carl Copper think that the Republic is about? I mean, he he condemns, he's writing, he publishes at the very end of World War II, right? He specifically condemns the sort of class structure in the city that's sort of people are by nature, meant to rule, be ruled, et cetera, as fundamentally racist.

And he's obviously got the Nazis, the Nazis in the background. And obviously totalitarian and many people have reacted that way. Right. Which interesting, few people have reacted to it and said, wow, it's totalitarian.

I have totalitarian inclinations. I think I'll do this too, because anybody who has a totalitarian sort of bone in their body, they read this and they think, well, I can do this. There's one notable issue. It's only liberals who get angry like it's corrupting actual totalitarian.

So like, no, just murder and rape and do all the horrible things. With one notable exception, by the way, Alex is a great uncle, who was a big devotee of Plato and who clearly modeled the Republic of Iran on Plato's Republic. He's very clear about this. So for the folks at home who don't know, Alex actually has a link to an actual attempt to bring into being the city and speech in Plato's Republic.

That's really interesting. Yeah. The Carl Copper's book is called What? The Open Society and its enemies are like this and Plato's enemy number one.

Yes, subtitle. We're talking about you, pre-use. I'm declaring jihad on Carl Copper, Al-Hoo Akbar. But the Carl, we don't want to go too far down this.

But I mean, this makes every important point. This is a fundamentally radical work, right? It covers such touchy subjects as infanticide, censorship, right? Complete sort of recharges in mechanics, things like that.

So it's got a lot of radical proposals. And in addition, it's also radical in the sense that it's the first work of political philosophy. And oftentimes you read early works. What does that mean, Alex?

That's a statement. It's the first attempt to figure out how we ought to organize ourselves politically on the basis of human reason alone. So then the title looks the title. The title is not thinking about how our foundational text is guiding us to organize ourselves with saying, let's wipe the slate clean and how are we going to do this, right?

And it's not early in the sense that you read some works in the early and you're just like, this is kind of rudimentary. It's early and it's like a flash of light, right? It really opens up all of the political problems. Even if you disagree with the solutions, you have to agree that Socrates is raising some basic political issues that every regime has to try to wrestle with.

And in that sense, it's a remarkable work. I mean, 300 pages that just... Of a dialogue. A dramatic dialogue.

So, such a weighty topic. Why didn't he just write it in a treatise? You guys have thoughts? I get this.

What am I saying? I've been taught this book. I guess I'll say I get this from students. I get this from friends.

When we'll do a reading group, they say, well, if this is so important, just write it in a similar manner to say Aristotle's politics. I mean, why? Obvious, why make it difficult? Anybody, they're stumbling blocks.

I think any newcomer and veteran Plato reader encounters with these texts, it's confused. They're purposely bad arguments are put forth. Don't quite understand whose voice is authoritative. Sometimes it seems like it's Socrates.

Sometimes it's not. So, why the dialogue for them? Do you guys have thoughts about that? Yeah, Greg's pointing at me.

I can... I was ready to go. I just thought you were ready. I have a couple points.

First off, I think we had an international later, we'll talk about different interpretations of the republic. But my own experience as a college student was that there are some professors who try to teach it as though it were actually simply a treatise. That it's straightforward. All the dramatic stuff is just for window dressing.

And that really this is a treatise where Plato was just laying out his version of what they would call the ideal regime or something like this, which is already sort of, I think, a mistake. I think that Plato's trying to teach us something more than what is the character of the best regime. I think that I'm teaching it right now. And so, I think that one of the things I'm stressing my students is that...

And the students are really noticing this, by the way. They're seeing how much attention Socrates pays to the character of his chief interlocutor. So, he'll be speaking one way. So, I'm skipping over.

We should probably run a circle back and do an outline the whole text. But most of the book is Socrates talking to two brothers, Galatkhan and Admanis, who were brothers at Plato's. I alluded to just a moment ago. And it seems as though Socrates is tailoring his speech to the two brothers in very clear ways.

And this becomes very obvious once you pay attention to it. But I'll just say one thing for first-time readers, just because Socrates is speaking to one person doesn't mean he isn't thinking about the other person he's speaking. So, often, I think he has Galatkhan in mind when he's speaking to Admanis and vice versa. I think Galatkhan is his primary but that's just a suspicion.

I probably could support it but I don't know if I'm prepared to do so now. So, why a dialogue? I think it shows us that the problem of justice is deep-seated in our souls and we have to work through that problem dialectically ourselves if we want to understand it. So, it's almost like a treatise is the inappropriate mode to treat this question because that's not how we approach the question ourselves.

I was just doing the... I was just doing the passage of the letter. I'm sorry. The call of the loser.

Sorry. No, no, no, that's mine. In my minority opinion. All right.

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Now back to the show. I was just lost my truth. I was doing the passage where Socrates begins to lay out why he's going to censor the poets. Alex mentioned this just a moment ago.

One of the reasons that they have to be censored is because they have a profound effect on the souls of the young. And it's really difficult to start to get that thing that's in their soul detached or to shake them at all. One of the reasons Plato writes dialectically, he writes a dialogue, is to try to simulate this shaking in the souls of the readers. In a way that a treatise is just more difficult to do it.

One thing I'll add, and maybe this will get us into one of our subjects in the round of show, which is a historical and political backdrop. But one of the earliest passages of political theorizing is actually in Herodotus's histories. In book three, what happens is that the Persian king, Cambyses, goes nuts. It leads to a faction killing all the magi, which are the religious authorities in Persia.

And once they're gone and Cambyses is gone, the question arises, but what kind of regime do we want to have? And it turns out that seems to be the pre-kendish. If we're asking that question, get rid of the old, which is a quiddity to religion, get rid of the sort of traditional religion. And let's start thinking on our own about how to instantiate it.

Similarly, in this dialogue, well, it starts with this missing and capitalist who's kind of high as old man. And in that sort of rejection, you can start thinking about it. Now, the great we think of political theory, and it's like a subfield in a couple of disciplines, right? You can study it in classics, you can study it in political science, you can study it in philosophy, right?

And it's a subdivision within this larger enterprise of the economy. But in a way, we're taking too much for granted to try and to look at it through that lens, right? And Plato draws our attention, I think, through the drama, through these characters by situating it in Athens at the time, he draws our attention to the fact that this kind of inquiry only arises when people are in a particular political condition, right? And that, I think, is ultimately necessary, because what happens is you go through a kind of crisis like Athens is going through at the time, and you have to start asking difficult questions you've never had to ask before.

And when you're trying to replace the old religion, right, with some new regime, you have to speak to those same longings, those same concerns, and that's to really embody these arguments, right, to put them into a context. I think it's too easily lost. And I think one advantage that I think meeting Plato has over Aristotle is if you can't ignore it, or I mean, you can't ignore it, but it's obviously doing violence to the text in a way, it isn't too Aristotle. You have to go back to this immediate context.

But I know you want to talk about the characters, but I think that I'm always trying to be cognizant of the folks at home. And 80% of our audience, that's four out of five people listen to the show, they're probably deeply familiar with the Republic, but for that one person who's not, maybe from my mom, I can just give a brief overview of what the text is about, just so that people understand. So it's called the Republic, which we, I think, in America tend to associate with a particular kind of government. It's more generic in the Greek, sort of the word Republic, that we translate, Republic applies to all different kinds of governments.

And what's going on in this book, it's very simple. It's actually quite simple. So Socrates, who's the main character in almost all the platonic dialogues, he goes out of town to a port called the Pyreus, where anyone who's from the earth, poor towns, and I know David is, we all know what happens down in the port towns. It's, you know, morals are a little laxer, shall we say down there, he goes to visit, and he goes to watch some sort of religious kind of thing.

And on his way back out of town, he gets held up by some young men who want to keep him and detain him. It's not clear what the purpose is for, they want to detain him. And so Socrates ends up being persuaded more or less to stay in the Pyreus outside of the city limits. And what proceeds to happen is a series of conversations about justice.

The first is with, he goes back to the house of an old man named Kefelis. He has a brief discussion with him, Kefelis leaves, and then Socrates proceeds to have a question about justice with some other young men. So after Kefelis, then has conversation with Danny Polendkis, who's the son of Kefelis. And then after that, this angry self-jumps in, it says, all this justice talk is crap.

Really justice is nothing but the advantage of the stronger. And you guys are all schmucks. Socrates demolishes this guy, sort of, at the end of book one. And then the rest of the book, so that's book one, they're 10 books.

The rest of the book, basically, the rest of the nine books, is Socrates trying to rise to the challenge issued by these two men, I've already mentioned Glaukhan and Animantis. So at the beginning of books two, Glaukhan and Animantis say, look, Socrates, I was neat how you just demolished Trusimachus, but really it was a sham defeat. We want to be persuaded that justice is really good. We don't want you to sort of beat up on Trusimachus.

And so the rest of the book is Socrates trying to persuade Glaukhan and Animantis that it's better to be just than unjust. He twice says he's incapable of doing that. And then he says, you know what, I have an idea instead of just talking about justice straight out, let's found a city and in speech, we're going to construct an imaginary city and we're going to talk to be awesome. And Alex says three times I count to and then basically what we're going to do is we're going to we're going to found the city, we're going to make it perfect.

And then after we founded it, then we're going to find justice. So they do this, they go through a whole account of the best city in speech. They talk about the warriors that emerge. I'm sitting a lot, by the way, they're going to talk about the education of the weir class.

That's a big part of it. Then ultimately we get to the idea that well, actually men and women are going to be perfectly part of this regime. You know what the philosophers are the smartest that they have to rule. So there's a children and philosophers.

And then basically the regime is done. Then there's a they start talking about different kinds of regimes because our best regime is going to evolve into worst kinds of regimes at some point. And and actually goes through the various types of regimes and shows what they are, what their purposes, what their goals are, how they come into being. And then at the end of that, by the way, this ends with a long discussion of tyranny because if you remember, well, you don't remember, I said, we're back in book one, or something that said the tyrant's life is the best life.

So in book nine, we contrast the philosophical life with the strength of life. The book then ends with a very long myth or story about the afterlife. So that's it, right? Problem of justice, book one, and there are a few myths there are few myths in the book, right?

Great. There are a few myths, not just a dial. I mean, there are a few myths interlaced throughout the whole work, right? There are plenty of stories.

There's the allegory decay that's very famous. Glaucon tells us the story of the, the account of the ring of Gaijis. So yes, you're right, that there are all kinds of stories interspersed throughout the republic. But the biggest one, the lengthiest one at any event, is the so-called myth of her in book 10, where Socrates describes the afterlife.

So that's it, the book ends. I think I've given it justice, so to speak, sorry. They're in the middle, by the way, actually does define justice with folks at home. Justice is minding your own business.

That's it. So, folks, if all you want to know is what justice says, there you go. So there's a brief 10,000 foot overview of the book. It contains, we'll talk about the algorithm, the cave, it's the most famous analogy.

So there's a kind of, sorry, it's the COVID fog. There's a, there's an end, Greg. How does it end? Or people just like, let me, I'm tired.

Or what happens? How does it end? Basically, actually, gives the myth of the myth of her and then says, let's all farewell, let us fair. Let's hope we do well.

Goodbye, basically. That's it. One thing I add to that is that it looks two through four, there's kind of two middle chunks, right, when you're talking about the education. Books two through four are really focused on moral education, making a noble warrior class, right?

Along the way, the issue comes up about the fact that the city needs to stay a certain size. It can't get too big because that leads to faction. That issue ends up driving books five through seven, which is the second part of the education, which in order to maintain the size of the city, they need to have this eugenics program and it needs to be understood in large of, in light of what is basically almost like an understanding of physical nature, the machinations of the cosmos in general. And that raises the whole sort of larger issue.

Along the way, glaucon, and this is maybe the tide into the long the way glaucon gets just gets enamored with this warrior glass and then with this philosophic education, he's completely swept into it only by the end of this in books seven to be convinced this is way too difficult for him. It's beyond him and he's dejected. He's come to love justice, right? He's criticized justice early on in book two.

He's come to love justice, but it's like a fleeting dream that he's never going to achieve. And the myth in a way will have meant to answer the question, well, look, I'll live just, but I'm not going to die, right? And it's meant to redeem this longing and it's this image of the fact that, well, look, you live it just like perhaps you'll be one of these types in the next life. And so the very, I think just to add a little bit of color to that, it's a very, if you're on glaucon side throughout, it's a very depressing end to the book, right?

A very dark ending in that you never get what you want. He never gets what he wants. I think one of the things you're meant to look at, you know, allotropic, you can't always get what you want, always get what you want. But I think one of the things you're supposed to learn is, yeah, you can't always cut what if you try some arms.

If you try sometimes, yeah, you get what you need. Yeah, yeah. So I think you played a lot of, so I think we're gonna have to censor that because that's copyrighted. But I mean, at the end, he comes to this position where it's almost like a cautionary tale.

Don't let your hopes get out of control. Don't let your vision for perfect justice gets out of control that one, you buy into this insane totalitarian regime and two, you realize it's beyond you and you're just left dejected and depressed. Oh, Alex, and so, but there have been famous interpreters that would say, no, no, you're reading this erroneously, right? Yeah, I mean, it seems pretty clear to me when you read it that that glaucon is a kind of cautionary tale.

I mean, Socrates, occasionally, no, that this is a book also on political moderation. Yeah, well, that's essentially, I think the point is that if you have, if you don't temper your hopes and you don't examine your hopes, like glaucon hasn't examined his hopes, you'll follow them out to the logical end and you'll just feel like the one thing that makes you happy is beyond you. And that's not a happy situation to be in. I'll put it like this glaucon laughs a lot and he's pretty tough until he realizes this.

And then he never laughs again, right? He's just kind of soured to the whole thing. I have a question for you guys. I've often heard tell that platonic dialogues can be paired or clustered based on theme together and certain interlocutors in this text appear in other of Plato's dialogues.

Can you say something about that? I mean, why is this a self? Can you read the Republican walk away with a kind of understanding of what Plato was about? Or must that of necessity be paired with other dialogues to make heads or tails up in a comprehensive way?

Oh, you want me to do that? Okay. The first thought that comes to mind is that you first, yes, I think you can study just the Republic. I think you can get a lot out of it.

I think a lot of students would be benefited. A lot of folks, a lot of folks at home, if you haven't picked up the Republic, we haven't even mentioned what translation we prefer. So if you're going on the Amazon or you're going to your local bookstore, the pre-translation, what happened? Nothing.

He translated it. Go on. Are you translated the Republic? Yeah, yeah, because I think Greg's internet, of course, brain tapped out for a second.

He's getting foggy. So you go to Amazon or your local five in time. And what do you recommend? Well, I suppose, Alfred, I was a recommender.

The Republic of Plato by Alan Bloom, basic books. They're now on the third edition, which you can get your hands on the first or second edition. It's just pure cut. The first, the first, the second, the first, the second, he corrects, right?

The third was not released in his lifetime. It contains no edits. It contains a kind of stupid introductory preface, whatever by somebody who's not a Plato's college, a poet, which is, I think, an anthem to the spirit of the Republic. But yeah, Alan Bloom, translation has got an amazing note and a very good essay.

Very, very good essay. Joe Sacks, the St. John's studio. That one's pretty good, too.

I like Joe Sacks translation. I also like Ferrari's translation. Both Cambridge is pretty good, actually. But of course, there's no substitute, like going to classicallanguageinstitute.com.

And learning the language for yourself, so you can read the original Greek. Did I get the website, right? Excellent. Ancientlanguage.com.

Ancientlanguage.com. Ancientlanguage.com. Anyway, so your question was, can you read it by itself? Yes, of course you can.

What dialogues is a pair with? That's a great question. The first thought that I had when you were asked the question was, there are a number of plutonium dialogues devoted to what I would call the Cardinal Greek virtue, so wisdom, justice, moderation, piety. What am I missing?

This is probably very telling. This is the wrong crowd to ask that question. Right, right? In any event, all of the other dialogues that are devoted to a cardinal Greek virtue, piety, courage, moderation, wisdom, they all end, I mean, use a fancy Greek word, aporetically.

So they end without a satisfying answer or definition to what the thing is. The unique dialog where you get an answer to what the virtue and question is, is actually played as republic. So you don't get an answer to what piety is, at least ostensibly or at courage or moderation or wisdom. But you do get an answer from Socrates as to what's justice.

So there's that. I guess I would have for Alex's. So this takes place overnight. So the first thing that will pop into my mind is, is there a dialog that takes place all during the day without the laws?

Fido and the laws. Fido and the laws. Fido parents with this and I was going to write this. This question might be taking us a bit far field.

Well, there are definitely characters and maybe this would be a good way to transition or pivot, as the kids say to you Alex. These characters, there are 10 of them plus Socrates and maybe you can just tell us about the various characters and also maybe about the timeline. When is this supposedly taking place in this sort of political, social political setting and Athens of the time? So you said they're 10 characters.

I think it's actually possible to actually enumerate the characters. When we start the dialogue, Socrates is stopped by Paul Marcus. It's with a couple of people that are not counting the slave boy, but the name characters, I count 10 plus the names, but there's also some unnamed characters that are with them. And we never hear whether or not they go to Kefelst's house.

So that's a kind of broader question that I think is left open. Now, I think one, we've given you guys a taste of what some of these characters are like. And one of the things I think we have to make sense of is he historically situates it. He gives it a kind of, he gives you a sort of vibrant sort of atmosphere of people with all these concerns on their mind.

One of the questions you have to ask is, why? Why is he situated in this? And why? Where did these longings come from?

You have to admit it's kind of crazy that people would ever find themselves in such a situation that they actually entertain like four different grounds for infanticide, right? Or a eugenics program. How corrupt do your politics have to be in order to lead to that? And it turns out pretty corrupt.

So I mentioned this passage from Herodotus, but a sort of similar thing happened to Athens towards the end of the, what are called the Greco-Persian wars? There's a battle of salamis, right? Now, this is, let's say, 60 years, this has been 480, this is 60 years before the Republic roughly takes place in probably the you know, 421, 422, something like that. Now, what happened that significant is that the Persians are invading Greece.

Everybody withdraws into the Peloponnesus behind a little isthmus, a little strip of land. But the problem is is before that strip of land is Athens, so the Athenians are effectively screwed. And they say, hey, can you come on out and defend us more over here? They say, nope, we're going back here.

So Athens is putting a real pickle. And Themistically, the Athenian general at the time says, you know what we're going to do? We're going to just tear down our houses, get rid of everything we're going to leave. And Athenians say, why would we do that?

That's like giving up everything. We'd rather die than destroy our temples, or the homes of our ancestors. That's giving up on their religion. Now, Themistically is manipulating some oracles, getting them to go through with it.

Long story short, it all works. But early in Thucydides history, one of the Athenians summarizes this battle beautifully. He says, look, Spartans, when you defended your home, it was from the homes you actually lived in. But our Athens no longer exists.

And we were fighting for an Athens that had a little hope of being in the future. And that's the situation Athens finds itself in is it's no longer grounded in the traditional religion. It's no longer grounded in the worship of the ancestors, which is the core aim of any Greek city, any traditional Greek city. And so the question is, what are they going to be?

Now, as the war goes on, the Peloponnesian war goes on, you know, in which this dialogue takes place, this is pretty ugly, like attempts to make Athens great, and make Athens noble and wonderful and lovable. This new Athens to reinvent itself in this new abstract terms. And we don't need to go through all the details. But you can see how easily this question of departing from the old Athens and asking yourself, where are we going to be?

Least of this theoretical question, much as we saw Herodotus with the Persians. And so you have a guy named Glaukon, this young man. And he approaches Socrates after book one, which is just this weird, messy dialogue where an order slash office is there, kind of indicative of the moral decay of Athens as it's trying to figure out what it is. He just turns to Socrates, he says, look, I want to like justice, I want to love justice.

But all I'm surrounded by are these morally corrupt people like the it needs determination, but religion doesn't work. You know, the recipient is an oratory doesn't work. And so who do they turn to? To the philosopher?

And the question is, the answer is questions to know, but why is it difficult? Is it more likely inquiry? The question is, can philosophy actually do this job? Can it give you confidence in a fully just community?

Can it take the place of religion? Greg Sheikens had it. He had his finger up. So it's hoping to jump in here.

Oh, just a small point. Glaukonnes, I think you're right. The Glaukon doesn't like Athens. He sort of finds a decadent and sort of these all these pasty-faced, faced, waste rolls like there's something that's running about telling him justice is sham.

And I think what he, I think, is confused. I think he doesn't, he's not a religious way to justice is good, but on the other hand, he really longs for a sort of really serious robust justice. I think he actually admires Sparta great deal. And what he wants, which is, of course, this is the city that Athens is at war with.

So he admires Athens chief rival, it's main enemy. And what he wants is sort of, look, we are morally decadent. We're sissies. We're not manly.

We sort of sit around and drink and lie on couches. Like our enemy, those are the noble people. And so I think that that plays a lot into the kind of city that Asakshi actually goes on to develop. It's like super smart as part on steroids.

Yeah. You mentioned his confusion. I think even on this point, he's confused. We're on the one hand.

So he interjects early on saying, as they're building a very rudimentary, kind of rustic, new-colic, but the grarian and very sort of simplistic society, he says, I want all the stuff we have now. I want delicious food. I want all the imports. I want all the arts and everything.

So he advocates on behalf of Athens that it's imperial heights and its decadence. But then he readily gives that up later. And I think this is the difficulty with Glaukon. He wants to live a conspicuous admirable life.

But he's torn. What is that life? Is it the life of the Athenian empire, even worse, a tyrant who is absolutely audacious in their pursuit of individual pleasure? So the necessary culmination of this Athenian decadence?

Or on the other hand, am I rather going to be admirable in my utter discipline? Am I attaining a kind of moral virtue in all of its purity without any of the things that he finds discussed with in Athens? I think he's really in a psychic crisis. He doesn't know which way to go.

And Socrates understands that he's kind of damned either way. Either he becomes a tyrant or he becomes a revolutionary. And what he ultimately ends up doing is pushing him down the path of the revolutionary, but convincing him he can never do it. And that's, I think, a remarkable achievement that Pericles couldn't accomplish.

Neither could any of his later replacements in Athens. Certainly, through Cemikus, is encouraging in the other direction. And he shows that, well, hey, I could do it, but maybe only after 12 hours talking to one dude. Are there any other characters?

So I mentioned that there are some. Really? You go into these characters. Sorry, Greg.

Actually, did you want to say something? No, go ahead. I just had a question about characters. Can you talk a little bit about how Plato uses characters' stand-ins for human types?

Is it's weird? I mean, Alex is giving a historical overview. So these were real people that took part in real events, sometimes a leading part in real events, like, say, also, vites, who doesn't appear in the Republic, of course, but just as an example. But at the same time, they're manipulated in the drama of Plato's dialogues.

So what's he doing with that? That's a great question. Alex, I want you to jump in and correct me your answer when I say it. So I think you're right.

I mean, these are, on one hand, they're real historical people. On the other hand, they are stand-ins for types. And I heard it said recently, Alex, or you won't. Somebody said this.

If you read all the Pletani dialogues, you will never meet another new human being in your life. So the idea that in all of the dialogues later, he sort of comprehends all human types. I don't know if that's entirely right, but it's at least something we're thinking of. So yeah, I mean, glaukon and men are different types of- On cheese and the luster.

So I think you refuted Plato. Yeah. No, that's cheddar-riffless, right? Isn't that the character in the luster hippies?

Anyway, cheddar-file. There you go. That's why I should have said cheddar-file. In any event, glaukon and men are different types.

So Adam Antis, his name means something fearless, maybe, and then glaukon's name means something like braid or something. It sounds like he fights Wolverine. Is that accurate or inaccurate? I didn't hear you.

I'm sorry. Oh, yeah, that's probably the best kind of response that we still become. No, I just didn't know where he said what was that. I just made a dumb joke about Wolverine.

We will take it out. No, it's fine. So I think there are different types. I mean, glaukon is the very beginning of what it says glaukon is most courageous or most manly.

The word in Greek is the same. And so you get the idea that he's a manly, ambitious type. And Adam Antis, I still haven't worked this out for myself. Adam Antis seems deeply moved by the stories about the gods on one hand, but also seems very suspicious of them on the other.

And so I detect a kind of fear of the gods in Adam Antis. He's also the other quality of Adam Antis is that he seems to be quite easygoing and lazy. And so you get different types there. I mean, there's a cynic if you wanted to have a type.

So yeah, I think that you have very real characters. I mean, capitalist, I mentioned this at the beginning of the guy, the very beginning of the dialogue, they go to capitalist's house and he's this rich old dude. I feel like I meet capitalist types all the time, people who are focused on material well-being. And by hook of my crookies successful in the world and then getting old and realizing maybe they've not lived their life up to their best standard.

So yeah, I do think that there are definitely human types that played out captures in the dialogues. Yeah, Alice? Yeah, I mean, maybe to add to that a little bit, Kefliss and Polomarkus are not Athenians. They're what are called medics, which mean it's just a bit too quickly.

It's a Greek term. It means basically a foreign resident or a resident. Yeah, they're not citizens, but they're there. They have certain legal protections and they can be involved now.

Paracles brought Kefliss in as an arms manufacturer. He's quite good at it. He had a factory. And one of the interesting things is both he and Polomarkus are a bit more well, Kefliss is more religious and Polomarkus is more committed to justice than anybody else in the dialogue.

Now, I think this is interesting because I just gave a sort of historical backdrop, but I want to be clear. This isn't historicizing the text like just trying to write it off as a creature of Athenian decay or something. It's rather understanding the political pre-contages that give rise to this. And so, similarly with Kefliss and Polomarkus, you get types, but he's also giving an historical context to sort of add color to it.

So they're not touched by Athenian decay. They don't have the same crisis, psychological crisis that Glaucon, for example, has by virtue of what happened at Salamus because well, you know, their old cities that way now, Polomarkus is unmoored. He's not connected to his home city, but here he is. And he's committed to justice.

And interestingly, he gives the advocates for patriotism or patriotic view of justice yet he doesn't have a fatherland. And you know, he gets one from Socrates, right? He gives him a kind of city that he can rally around these just. Yeah.

So you get a kind of traditional kind of justice from Kefliss, a sort of patriotic woman from Polomarkus. And then you get a cynical view of justice from Plomarkus. So you do have these types and just piggybacking on the name business. Polomarkus's name means something like what?

War-battler and Kefliss who's the father who's the head of the household. His name means head. So yeah, I do think there's something to the idea of these guys represent types. Did you want to mention anything about the fact?

All right, folks, today's episode is also brought to you by ISI. Now, you probably listened to the new thing because you love thinking deeply about important texts, authors, and ideas. Perhaps you're a professor at a university. If so, I think you need to check out the Intercollegiate Studies Institute or ISI David.

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Well, Pole Marcus gets killed. Yeah, Lisius does not because he wrote a speech called against Eratosthenes, persecuting this guy or prosecuting this guy, Eratosthenes, who put Pole Marcus to death. So he obviously survived. They have a brother, those two.

This is kind of maybe too far filled with the demons, his name is, but we don't know anything about him, whether he exists or not outside of this dialogue. Lisius never mentions him in this existing speech. So I want to go back to Itamanza and glaup him a bit and maybe add a bit because they're so prominent. Itamanza, and this is maybe we can talk a little bit about how their characters interplay.

If you read this dialogue, you really do need a pay attention. The first time you read it, you're just like, wow, these ideas, there's so many different political problems. Oh my God, these proposals are crazy. After you go through it, once or twice that way, you need to start thinking about the characters and think about who's interjecting.

And I think, for instance, Guelcan, his own moral corruption emerges when he, as I mentioned before, demands all these luxury items. But also, his sort of ambitions, as Greg was saying, his ambition and his sort of daring comes up a couple times when he's willing to put people to death for being slightly ill and things like that. And his desire, finally, in book five, he says, how do we bring this regime into being? He has this strong yearning for regime change.

He wants to bring the regime into being, not the city. That means I need to put it in a city basically needs revolution. Right. There's, and likewise, Idemantis, he's very fair.

His critique of religion is it just corrupts people. This is a defective religion. And lo and behold, he's involved in the discussion of how to pare down the religion, right, how to make it more pure. He's also initially there when he even thinks, well, maybe I don't need a city at all.

Maybe I'll just live by myself and take you with me for myself. Right. And he's also comes in very late in the dialogue. This is just a few of many examples.

He also comes in late in the dialogue. And he criticizes Guelcan for his excesses, right? And says he loves honor too much. He's too concerned with others.

And Idemantis ultimately is reconciled to view of justice, which is look, democratic Athens, it's all mass. Imperial Athens is pretty ugly. The best you can do is just hide away and live a private life thinking about these bigger questions. And so you see that their glockens boldness are daring on the one hand and Idemantis is sort of a strange or sort of natural inclination towards moderation.

They both play a sort of thematic role as the dialogue unfolds. And when you start looking at it that way, I think what you start to realize is that Plato's political philosophy is not in these crazy proposals, right? But it's in the interplay between the longings of this character, these characters or their dispositions and their reactions to these proposals. And as you saw, as he's working these passions and these hopes, you really get a sense of what political psychology is, right?

What are these longings I have that only achieve satisfaction in politics? And what does Plato think about them? Will you see them as they sort of play out in the drama of the day? Well, look, we've been paying a lot of attention to the drama.

And I think that if we do some more episodes on this, that folks at home can expect it will do more and more of that. But this is an introductory synopsis kind of episode. What are some of the main, like we can't not talk about the forums, right? We can't not talk about the cave, right?

We didn't believe in those, Greg. We cannot talk about incest, right? Like, they're just things that we have to talk about, right? Like, that non-stralisions, people not trained like us, like the day would sort of like, how can you possibly do an episode and probably not talk about X, Y, and Z?

So what are those things? Right? I meant the cave, um, sexual communism, the ideas. What are the three or four things, Alex, that like our friends, our colleagues across the island, philosophy around the world, like the real philosophers, what would they say are the important?

Not you and me, like, not you. Well, why don't you, you said, you just said that you can't not talk about incest. So why don't you start there? And you did say that you want to start?

That's where you want to start. That's where you want to start. You said you cannot talk about you brought this up. I just think he's incapable of not talking about it.

You said you said we can't, but you never passed our opinions. So constitutionally incapable of it. You're not talking about incest. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Well, one of the- It's not a family vacation, man. I don't go on vacations without my family.

I don't see how that's your main. Is it romantic? Yeah. And daddy like, it's a matter of people.

You're sick. So one of the- we can start with incest, sure. So one of the things I mentioned in the sort of really brief overview of the text is that one of the things you're doing to try to train a warrior class, there's a lot of attention paid to the education of these warriors, specifically the musical education. Less attention is paid to the gymnastic education, like their physical fitness.

I think that's because that's not very controversial. But most of the emphasis is placed on what sorts of things they ought to be taught, what kinds of music they listen to, what kind of lyrics, what stories about God. So they hear. And so the idea is that they're going to get this overly martial education.

Like there's this huge class in our best city and their primary job, their only job really is to guard the city against enemies. And so that a large part of books, what, two, three, and four, talk about the education of the warrior class. We sort of have these super Spartan soldiers. There's this old Kurt Russell movie with it where he was like a soldier and he was like a robot soldier.

He doesn't know this movie. Universal soldier. And I can't always tell. Anyway, that was the idea.

Like they take you away at childhood at birth actually, and you're trained your whole life to be a warrior. At one point, it's actually says, well, we all know that women are just as vicious as just as militaristic as men. They're just as tough. And so we should take men in women and train them all and they're going to be warriors.

And you know, one of the things that really makes people be unjust, we all know from Greek tragedy is the family. So let's just abolish the family. Let's take the kids out of household, let's raise them in a pig pen and let's train them to be warriors. And to that end, therefore, people can't know who their parents are, they can't know who their siblings are, they can all these things.

And so this leaves open the prospect of there might be incest in the regime. Now that's sort of comically alluded to. But Alex has mentioned a couple of times eugenics from a strictly rational order point of view, Socrates implies we ought to in fact breathe those people who are particular strengths. And that might mean the very intentional use of incest in fact, to bring about the most expert warriors.

So in this perfectly just city, we're demolishing the family. There are no husbands and wives, there are husbands, wives, or even but basically men and women hold one other in common, children are in hell and common. So we're getting rid of the family, women are fully equal, women are warriors just like men, and we'll have special people who raised the kids. So one of the fascinating parts about, and we actually had Saxon House on a few weeks ago to talk about this, is this one way that you can read this text of being very, as time as opposed to speaking as far as talking about the whole sexual equality, Alex is sneering at me.

So since we talked about it, it's just satisfying to you, and you want to go farther. You're the one who's satisfied. But I think one thing I mentioned about this eugenics program is it's introduced as Socrates asking, just how darn efficient it is. The Socrates asking, you read dogs and horses and stuff and cattle, right?

It's like, let's do that with people. So it's utterly depressing, right? Utterly, just like a cow, utterly dehumanizing. Those jokes may fly in National and Ohio, but here, let me tell you a little secret, the cheese barn, people love my jokes tonight.

Utterly. Anyway, go ahead. He says, yeah, you have experienced milking bowls, and then what happens, Alex? Yeah, so anyways, I mean, there's, the model is meant to be pretty dehumanizing, right?

Pretty, you know, and this is a consistent thing. So to take, for example, more formation. Socrates at one point, this is the moral education with the censorship stuff, right? Socrates was like, look, young people are impressionable.

They can be molded, and they will follow the models you give them. So you got to be very careful. And so everybody agrees. Like, yeah, you got to be careful.

You don't expose your children everything. And then the question becomes, well, okay, should you expose anyone to anything bad if they're going to potentially model themselves on it? And Socrates answer, at least so the answer you put forward is no, of course you shouldn't. And therefore you should have state sponsored censorship, right?

Now, this is a typical example of how the Republic recedes. You've taken a problem that you recognize, which is yes, if you don't, if you're not careful, people read any old thing and they're going to have bad role models and they can derail their lives and they'll become bad people and maybe they'll regret it. But this is really bad for a community. On the other hand, on the other hand, if you actually force people to only model themselves after good people, there's a couple consequences.

One, it's incredibly repressive, right? And two, all the stories will be boring. They're all like very sort of like moral kind of fables. That's not a place you want to live, right?

But then you have to face the question, the fact, which is look, if we're going to allow freedom in the arts, freedom to produce whatever models you want and people might guide themselves, freedom means fundamentally a freedom to be bad and freedom to produce bad people, right? And it might be that the cost of good art or good cautionary tales, I tell you about what people are actually like, the depths to which they'll sing, is that a couple of people are going to read them, they're halfway, right? And that's just the sort of necessary consequence. I think there's in a way applies to the Republic, right, where you get all these characters that it's very easy to be overtaking if you follow the glaucon and go in that direction.

But yeah, that's another one. Should we talk about the forms? I mean, that ties into the eugenics program, right? Like we have to talk about the forms.

Why don't you say once a small point that before we move on is that I was struck by, maybe this isn't the, maybe I've noticed this in the past, but when Socrates is talking about what's the sense of the stories that they use here because they're so impressionable, he talks about the notion that there is a hidden meaning to these texts and Homer and he sees them like, and so, you know, that religious texts in general might have a deeper meaning, but that people latch on to the superficial text, the superficial meaning of the text when they're young and so it gets to hold of their souls and they have a hard time letting go of that later on in life. So I mean, it's just, we'll probably come back to this if we do an episode on the censorship of poets, but just the Socrates, he says we got to give him the best of these bad stories, but it's possible that even the bad stories have something, Alex, you don't have to talk about this in the past, but some of these stories where the gods are having the various sexual relations in the Sunday, they might actually have a deeper meaning, it's not meant to be taken literally. The problem of course is that people do take them literally and the literal models are bad models for human lives. And he even holds out the possibility there could be some poet that does this really well, he calls this a wise poet, it's one of the few times he talks about wisdom in moral education passage, and they just kick him out anyways, right?

And that might be the cost, right? It might be that there's some great work that could be written that would, for the right reader, be absolutely formative, and it's very clear that Socrates in many places, including here has learned quite a bit from Homer. But as from a standpoint of moral education, educating the average soldier in this community, it's really not a good idea. But again, I mean, this is, to go back to what, you know, when I teach this, I tend to tell students this, I'm like, look, he always introduces a sensible problem, and they always introduces a perfect solution, and the perfect solution is always outrageous.

And the rhetorical effectiveness is to make us ask, which do we prefer, living with the problem, or adopting this solution? And it's really hard to come down and favor the solution often. And that's, I think, the sort of mechanism by which this has its moderating effect. Right.

It's good. Forms, correct. I know you want to talk about the forms, but I feel like I'll just mention in passing the forms emerges out of a conversation, which is probably the most famous image of the entire book, the Algory the Cave. So it sort of comes about after that.

The Algory the Cave, if you focus on what you have in the Republic, there's probably the most famous part of the Republic, right? So after Socrates has spoken about the education of the Warriors, and then the education philosophers, he says at the beginning of book seven, let's give an image of our education and lack thereof, right? You and me, not people are invested in our education. And he says, I'm going to do this gross injustice by just giving it various, very sort of, you know, quick down and dirty, but we're all human beings are born in a cave, a little cave, our heads, necks, legs, we're all chained facing a wall on that wall or images, right?