>>>>Plato's "Republic", a timeless classic of political philosophy. In some ways the
original text of Western political philosophy. It is, to say the least, a challenging document
to read, a challenging text. And over the next few lessons we want to explore its meaning
and also begin to question how we can understand what Plato was trying to say with this text.
Socrates, Plato's teacher, didn't write down his philosophical teachings. It was left to
his students like Xenophon and Plato to do so. Plato was a great literary talent. And
in fact Plato is not just regarded as a philosopher in the ancient world, but as a beautiful writer.
And he wrote what are called dialogues, conversations which portray Socrates as the main character.
Now Plato was a productive writer who wrote over many decades, and he wrote dialogues
that portray Socrates. And Plato's dialogues are generally divided into early, middle and
late. What's important is that over Plato's his career he portrays Socrates somewhat differently.
The early dialogues are thought somehow to represent a more authentic picture of what
Socrates was actually like. It's hard for us to say because we don't have very much
to compare Plato's image of Socrates to. In the early dialogue, Socrates is always questioning
and the dialogues end in complete aporia. They end in complete openness-- there's no
resolution. "The Republic" with the corpus of Plato's writings represents a departure.
It was a new kind of text. It's still a dialogue and it still features Socrates as its main
character, but now Socrates does almost all of the talking. "The Republic" is longer.
In "The Republic" Plato begins not just to ask questions, but to offer answers. "The
Republic" has been a profoundly challenging text, and it's been interpreted in a huge
number of ways by different readers. It's a hard text to read. It's a text that combines
ethics and politics, and indeed some readers would like to see it as principally about
ethics and not really about politics at all. But that's not the correct way to read the
text. It's fundamentally about ethics and politics and the connections between the two.
The title of the text in Greek is politeia. That's translated as Republic through the
Latin res publica, but it means in Greek "the constitution", it means "the way of life".
And this Greek world politeia is somewhere between our English words the constitution,
which evokes a system of laws that a society lives under, a system of government for making
laws and a whole way of life that includes culture and education and values. And "The
Politeia" is a utopian text. In some ways it's one of the first utopian texts. Utopia
is a Greek word that means good place an ideal place. And in this text the "Republic", Plato
imagines an ideal society. He creates an imaginary society that is the benchmark. It's an ideal
against which real societies can be measured. "The Republic" is a challenging text, but
I think we can say that it makes principally three fundamental contributions to our thinking
about law and about justice. One, "The Republic" says that justice is more than simply a contract.
That justice is more than simply a law or a set of agreements, a set of contractual
agreements among citizens of a polity not to harm each other. That justice is somehow
more than simply going about your own life and not hurting others. Plato recognizes the
profound implications of the idea that justice is more than simply an agreement not to harm
others. Two, the second fundamental contribution of "The Republic", is that "The Republic"
recognizes that the way of life, the constitution of a society has the profoundest implications
for the individual and his or her ethical, moral well-being. "The Republic" recognizes
that the nature of individual morality and the order of society are inextricable, and
the two can't be considered apart from one another. And the third fundamental contribution
of "The Republic" is as a statement about the importance of the common good. "The Republic"
envisions a society that aims at the common good, the shared good. And to appreciate the
radical challenge of Plato's "The Republic" we need to recognize that he carries through
to its logical conclusions the idea that the common good is the highest good. That it somehow
overrides private, individual good, and Plato is willing to shape a constitution that's
ideally suited to pursue the common good.