sense of phenomenological method by practicing it.
3. Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology. A substantial history of the phenomenological movement.
4. Dermot Moran, The Phenomenology Reader. Readings from the thinkers covered in Moran’s history (3, above).
* * * *
1. This essay is the result of a collaborative effort in a phenomenology workshop at the University of Dallas. I wish to thank Glenn Chicoine, Michael Jordan, Landon Lester, Lynn Purcell, Michael Tocci, and Matthew van House for their contributions to the development of the work.
PLATO’S REPUBLIC
The philosopher keeps his eyes always fixed on the Whole . . . and the universal nature of every thing that is, each in its wholeness.
—Plato,Theaetetus, 173c
. . . always devoting himself through reasoning to the idea of Being.
—Plato, Sophist, 254a
READINGS
The Republic of Plato:
1. The opening and the discussion with Cephalus: death, justice, and philosophical reflection (327a–329e)2
2. The Ring of Gyges (359d–360d)
3. The soul and the cardinal virtues (end of Book IV, 427d–445e)
4. The Sun, the Cave, and the Line (middle of Book VI, 505a–511d; VII, 514a–524e)
5. Immortality and the Judgment of the Dead (end of Book X, 608c–612a, 3pp; 614b–621d)
1.
Twentieth-century mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that the history of philosophy is a series of footnotes on Plato.3 American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “Philosophy is Plato, and Plato, Philosophy.”4 The best introduction to Western philosophy is a careful study of Plato’s works. Plato is particularly important for understanding the way reflection upon revelation occurred among the Church Fathers, for early theology was dominated by Platonic ways of thinking. And that influence continued unabated—for better and for worse—throughout the centuries.
Plato (429–348 BC) was originally a tragedian—until he met Socrates who subjected him to a philosophic grueling. After that he burned his plays (alas!) but turned his literary talents to writing philosophic dialogues where he combines the use of imagery, the description of character, dramatic action, allegorizing, and myth-making with philosophic questioning and construction. His early work was a retelling of the trial and death of Socrates who was killed for unsettling Athenian authorities by his relentless questioning of their understanding of ultimate things.5 Thereafter Socrates becomes the main character in the dialogues; but later he becomes secondary, finally disappearing in favor of other major speakers. So it becomes difficult to say what is Socrates’s and what is Plato’s in the dialogues. But that is only of historical interest and irrelevant to understanding their philosophic content.
2.
In the center of Plato’s works stands the Republic: all the chronologically previous dialogues lead up to it; all those subsequent follow from it. The work is structured around an ascent and a descent, beginning with the first line where Socrates said “I went down” and was about to “go up.”6 “Down” is allied with darkness, “up” with light. These are the central metaphors that structure the work: up/down, darkness/light. Plato chose them because they are metaphors used in everyday life for our own thinking in terms of meaning. When we are “down” our life is dark and gloomy, when we are “up” it is bright and sunny, etc.
“Down” at the beginning is literally the Piraeus, the sea port down by the sea from Athens that stands up on a hill. The occasion is the celebration of the feast of the goddess Bendis, a goddess of the dark underworld. Socrates and his companion Glaucon are playfully threatened with the use of force to keep them down in the “underworld” in order to watch a torchlight procession at night. They consent to stay, though Socrates says there is always the option of his persuading them to let him and his companion go up to the city. At the conclusion to the main argument in Book IX Socrates speaks of “the city laid up in heaven,” looking to which one can become the philosopher-king of one’s own life (IX, 592B). The actual city of power is “down” in relation to the city “constructed in words” that is the true measure of what is “up” in life. The dialogue is about persuading the city of power that the philosophy Socrates practices will not harm it but could bring it the greatest benefit.
They come to the home of old Cephalus who is concerned about death and the darkness of the Underworld, and this prompts him to think about how he had lived his life (I, 328B–331d). First he thought a meaningful life was one of bodily pleasure; then he thought it was money (he made a bundle with a shield-manufacturing company); but now he thinks it might be what the “old foggies” had said all along: it was a life of justice. The dialogue consists in probing what justice really is, beginning with common opinions that Socrates proceeds to take apart. The opening argument moves up in complexity as Socrates refutes one character after another, but the characters seem to move down in motivational structure. Cephalus presents a commercial understanding of justice: paying what is owed. His son Polemarchus presents a civic view where justice is helping the citizens and allies and harming enemies. Thrasymachus presents a “realist” view: he claims it is the benefit of the stronger who make the laws in their own self-interest; but for the average person it is obeying those laws.
In the main argument that follows in the first book, Socrates claims a parallel between the city and the soul (that is, the conscious life of human beings): it is the city that shapes the soul and the soul that reinforces the city (II, 368d). He constructs three levels of a city, moving up from a level of biological necessity (providing food, clothing, and shelter by a division of labor) to a city of luxury that becomes “bloated and feverish,” and on further up to a “purged” city that orders the chaos of the luxurious city.7
Setting up his argument about the nature of justice as right order of the soul, Glaucon introduces the legend of the Ring of Gyges (I, 359d). Gyges was a shepherd who fell in a hole that led to an underground cave in which a corpse was laid out with a ring on its finger. Gyges took the ring and discovered that when, at the fireside with his fellows, he turned the ring around, he disappeared. He then used the ring to seduce the queen and to kill the king.
Through this story, Glaucon is asking us to perform a mental experiment. Suppose you had such a ring, what would you do? Most people would probably say they would continue to do what they usually do. But if it was discovered that the ring made one disappear from the gods as well, then what would they do? Fyodor Dostoevsky in Brothers Karamazov has one of his characters, Ivan, say, If there is no God, all is permitted.8 God’s watching is what keeps naturally disorderly people in place, for he is ready to punish and reward. Plato has Socrates argue from the premise of disappearance from men and gods, and argue that there is an intrinsic order and disorder to the soul, with consequences of satisfaction and dissatisfaction for how we think and act, whether seen or not, whether rewarded or punished externally or not. In effect, the right order of the soul lies in its being oriented by love of the Good as the principle of the Whole. This directly parallels being moved by the love of God rather than by the stick and carrot of punishments and rewards in an afterlife.
3.
The classes in the purged city parallel the levels of the soul: the biologically desirous level (pleasure- and money-loving artisans), the competitive level
