In The Republic, Plato sets out to define justice. To do this, he and those he converses with describe the construction of a great city. By imaginatively “building” this city and examining its party, they believe that they will be able to determine what makes it just or unjust. Following this “construction”, they think they can understand what makes a single person just or unjust, because the same qualities that make a person’s city just or unjust make a person so.
Because the group reasons that individuals are not entirely self-sufficient, the city, which starts out as a small group of people, becomes more and more populated. These people must be able to perform certain tasks very well, and do them for others as well as themselves. Farmers must be willing and able to provide food for themselves and the citizens, clothiers must be able to make garments for themselves and the citizens, and so on. This is necessary for the “collective good” a theme which carries throughout the piece.
The thinkers reason that there are groups of people who are necessary for the survival and thrust of the city: guardians, money-makers and the military. What is more; it is only when these people are focusing on their specific tasks (i.e. making money, protecting the city through military activity or governance) that the city functions in a just manner. Throughout the piece, there are many questions asked to get the philosophers (and, of course, the reader) closer to a more complete definition of justice and what just people and social groups looks like. Among them are:
• How should the guardians of a city be educated?
• How should they pass on knowledge?
• What is appropriate/inappropriate for them to teach?
• What should be taught to result in certain outcomes (academic, personality) from students?
The philosophers eventually use to the allegory of the cave to discuss what constitutes knowledge, and the disposition people have towards learning and sharing information, especially when it challenges all that they have known before.
What is most compelling to me, however, is how the thinkers never move far away from the idea that only when people are “in harmony” with themselves, and then “in harmony” with their fellow citizens is the city thriving, no matter how well people are educated (443c “The truth being that justice is…”). Or rather, the goal of education and “rearing” is to give a person the tools necessary to do the tasks they are most suited to do (?) If people are not doing the tasks that align with their talents, then they are not acting as “themselves”, and thus are not able to do the most good for the most people. The point of the governance of the city is not to make only one group of citizens happy, but to make the most that can be, happy. And justice is served when people are doing their own work well, not the work of others. How do we feel about this as educators, and if it’s agreeable, how do we present that idea to others with balance, not tipping the scale too far the side of individualism, or the opposite, encouraging people only to take on work that is beneficial to the group without contemplating what is satisfying on a personal level?
Your comments here make me wonder about whether, in contemporary society, we have enough of a sense of the state as a "polis," or organic whole, with its own life beyond the individual. The greeks firmly believed the health of the polis was more important than the health of an individual...they felt dependent on the health of the city in a way that modern people do not seem to. (On the other hand, the anxiety that Americans seem to have these days comes from SOME sense of dis-ease in the larger society...although we lack, I think, a way to talk about it. We'll explore these ideas more as we go...thanks for thinking!
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