Plato makes Glaucon one of Socrates’ major interlocutors in the Republic, together with another brother of Plato’s, Adeimonstos, who is not quite as prominent in the dialogue. Plato’s Glaucon is not in the least a doofus. He’s shown as enjoying an excellent memory, a decent knowledge of mathematics, above average musical ability, and a great deal of political idealism. In fact, both brothers, according to one scholar, exemplify exactly the right combination of thoughtful resistance and just as thoughtful receptiveness that allows Plato’s Socrates to progress from negative elenchus, or refutation, to positive creativity.45
In the first book of the Republic an irascible sophist named Thrasymachus becomes so apoplectic at the high-minded moral argument he’s hearing from the lips of Socrates that he charges into the discussion like an analytic philosopher on amphetamines, insisting on what a contemporary philosopher would describe as the cognitive meaninglessness of the normative propositions—those involving the word “ought”—that Socrates is spouting. Allow me to disabuse you of your delusions, Thrasymachus thunders, while Socrates pretends to recoil in terror (336d). There are no objective facts of the matter concerning how people ought to live their lives. There are simply the facts of how they want to live their lives, people pursuing their own self-interest as best they can, with the strong succeeding as anyone would if only they could. So live as you wish, live in any way that you can get away with, shouts the sophist, his own bullying style of argument dramatizing his views. Just so long as you’re able to get away with it, you’re in no danger of getting it wrong, there being nothing to get wrong.
Blustering Thrasymachus soon runs out of steam, and Plato hands the discussion over to his brother Glaucon to develop the amoral line in quieter, subtler tones, evincing a sort of wistful wish to be talked away from the point of view he’s developing, whether in self-advocacy or as the devil’s advocate. “Perhaps the most striking feature of Plato’s double portrait here is his brothers’ shared detachment from the case they make with such vehemence.”46 Plato has Glaucon devise a thought-experiment involving the Ring of Gyges, which renders its wearer invisible and so able to get away with anything.
Now, no one, it seems, would be so incorruptible that he would stay on the path of justice or stay away from other people’s property, when he could take whatever he wanted from the marketplace with impunity, go into people’s houses and have sex with anyone he wished, kill or release from prison anyone he wished, and do all the other things that would make him like a god among humans. Rather his actions would be in no way different from those of an unjust person and both would follow the same path. This, some would say, is a great proof that one is never just willingly but only when compelled to be. No one believes justice to be a good when it is kept private, since, wherever either person thinks he can do injustice with impunity, he does it. Indeed, every man believes that injustice is far more profitable to himself than justice. And any exponent of this argument will say he’s right, for someone who didn’t want to do injustice, given this sort of opportunity, and who didn’t touch other people’s property would be thought wretched and stupid by everyone aware of the situation, though, of course, they’d praise him in public, deceiving each other for fear of suffering injustices. (360b–d)
Glaucon is not arguing the nihilism of bilious Thrasymachus. The sophist had argued that there were no objective moral truths, whereas Glaucon seems to acknowledge, albeit vaguely, that there might be such truths, but if there are they’re completely beside the point in changing our behavior. Even if you’ve convinced me that something is wrong, why should I change my behavior, especially if I’m strong enough—or sneaky enough—to get away with it? It’s only the fear of the damage we can do to ourselves and our reputations—our acoustic renown—that has any effect on our wills, argues Glaucon, almost as if against his will. You can all but hear him pleading: Please, please convince me otherwise.
Thrasymachus and Glaucon by no means put forth the same views. Thrasymachus speaks for an unregenerate Ethos of the Extraordinary that licenses unmitigated individualism. He’s an Athenian Ayn Rand. The extraordinary person is the one who can act as he will. He embodies aretē, the sort of human attributes that make for “acoustic renown,” and there is no external standard by which to judge him. Everything about Thrasymachus, his opinions as well as his high-decibel manner of putting them forth, highlights the antisocial nature of his version of the Ethos of the Extraordinary.
An ethos encouraging kleos-measured extraordinariness can easily lead to antinomian individualism. This was not just a theoretical but a practical problem, most especially in Athens, whose sense of collective extraordinariness was very much a matter of its extraordinary individuals. (Sparta is to be contrasted with Athens in this regard. Sparta’s exceptionalism eschewed individualism.) The Athenian predicament—the potentially destabilizing effect of celebrating individual extraordinariness for the sake of its extraordinariness—might be dubbed its “Alcibiadean Problem,” after the famous Alcibiades. This undeniably extraordinary individual left behind a trail of grand-scale treachery and turmoil. He betrayed Athens to its archenemy Sparta, then betrayed Sparta to Athens, then betrayed both Athens and Sparta to Persia. Alcibiades, beautiful as a god, brilliant in both oratory and military prowess, rich and charismatic, always insisting on his own way and more often than not getting it, carrying on as if he, too, just like Achilles, came from metaphysically mixed parentage: how could the Athenians have failed to love him, no matter how many times he used and abused them, misled and mistreated them?47 Alcibiades was not only Athens’ Achilles. He was Athens’ Achilles’ heel.
The kleos-worthy man was several decades dead when Plato wrote the Republic, having lived out the short but extraordinary life that could have been predicted for him, killed by an assassin (or so goes one of the tales of his ending). Thrasymachus’ view could not muster any ground for finding fault with Alcibiades, but Thrasymachus’ view was not the majority opinion of Athens’ citizenry on the issue of such men as Alcibiades, whose extraordinariness allow them to get away with everything.
And this is where Glaucon joins the conversation of the Republic, representing an Athens that realizes the dangers of antinomian individualism. Glaucon’s Athens recognizes its Alcibiadean Problem—that there are those who, by virtue of their personal advantages, wear a kind of Ring of Gyges—and he offers a political solution. For the good of the polis, certain compromises must be made. The good of the polis trumps the free-range extraordinariness of individual men, and so men have freely ceded some of their freedom. They have made a social contract of sorts, and it is from this that all the notions of justice and injustice are derived.
Plato’s Glaucon, in developing his politicized view of justice, anticipates Hobbes. In the state of nature, so to speak, there is neither justice nor injustice. The state of nature is a Thrasymachean world, in which individuals all seek to impose their own wills, causing suffering as they need to in order to get their way. To impose one’s will is good, while having another impose his will on you is evil. But men discovered that the evil was greater than the good, Glaucon says (359a), by which he seems to mean both that, qualitatively, the pain of having others impose their will on you is more experientially intense than is the pleasure of your imposing your will on others; and also, quantitatively, there are just more people who get imposed upon than who get to impose.48 And for this reason, men
decide that it is profitable to come to an agreement with each other neither to do injustice nor to suffer it. As a result, they begin to make laws and covenants, and what the law commands they call lawful and just. This, they say, is the origin and essence of justice. It is intermediate between the best and the worst. The best is to do injustice without paying the penalty; the worst is to suffer it without being able to take revenge. Justice is a mean between these two extremes. People value it not as a good but because they are too weak to do injustice with impunity. Someone who has the power to do this, however, and is a true
man wouldn’t make such an agreement with anyone not to do injustice in order not to suffer it. For him that would be madness. This is the nature of justice, according to the argument, Socrates, and these are its natural origins. (359a–b)
The view that Plato has Glaucon develop is startlingly modern. It not only anticipates the Hobbesian theory of the social contract, but puts the reasoning behind the social contract in game-theoretic terms, defining what we today would call a prisoner’s dilemma. The “rational players” in Glaucon’s argument make their decisions based on trying to avoid the worst possible payoff, of behaving morally while others exploit them, and the second worst, of living in a world where they both exploit and are exploited, even if those same decisions exclude their chances of obtaining the best possible payoff, in which they exploit other innocents who don’t exploit them back. In order to avoid getting maximally screwed a rational person will forsake the chance of maximally screwing.49 This seems, both in Plato’s day and in ours, as good a description of the nature of politics as any, if politics consists of a viable, stable social order. But does it describe the nature of justice? Plato thinks not, and he spends the bulk of the Republic refuting the Glauconian—the Athenian—view that the demands of the political dictate the nature of morality. Quite the contrary, he argues, the demands of morality dictate—or at least ought to dictate—the nature of the political.
The view that morality was essentially political was far more common in Athens than Thrasymachus’ brand of nihilism. Thrasymachus’ nihilism was much more in line with the teaching of various sophists, and most Athenians mistrusted and despised the sophists. (One of the charges Socrates feels he must defend himself against during his trial is that he is a sophist. This is why he’s so insistent on never having accepted any fee for his services.)
Glaucon’s view, in which aretē has been socialized and spread around, is much more in line with the view of most Athenians, though far more sophisticated—and more detached from the specifics of Athenian exceptionalism than anything you’d have been likely to hear in the agora that Socrates wandered, incessantly pressing his questions. It’s still a requirement at the philosophy seminar table that, in order to refute a conclusion, you have to put forth the best possible argument for it. That’s what Plato is trying to do with Glaucon’s attempt to enfold morality into the political. Plato erects theoretical sophistication around what was, for most of Athens’ citizens, no more than the presumption that all of this business of what it is to live a life worth living had been taken care of, that they didn’t have to think about any of these questions since they had the great good fortune of being Athenians, an exceptional polis which defined aretē for all the world. (There are Americans who feel the same way, as well as citizens of other nation-states.) Socrates may have had the patience to try to talk his fellow citizens out of their complacency, but Plato wants the views he’s refuting to be worthy of his refutation.
In the Republic, Glaucon recognizes that his game-theoretic notion of justice hasn’t the force to restrain someone who wears the Ring of Gyges and so can get away with anything. It can’t even restrain an Alcibiades. Nor can Glaucon even argue that it ought to. What rational reason would a person who can always get his way with screwing anyone he wants have for abiding by the decisions of those who are just as likely to get screwed as to screw? What’s rational for them won’t be rational for him. Glaucon wants Socrates to tell him whether there are notions of goodness and justice that apply even to those who, by reason of their special advantages, escape his game-theoretic construction of morality; and if there are, he wants Socrates to tell him whether these notions have any muscle such that they can compel a rational person to act differently in accordance with them, even if, if he chooses not to, no ill will come to him since he can get away with anything. If moral truths are socially fabricated (“as a result, they begin to make laws and covenants, and what the law commands they call lawful and just”), then a person who is assured of no social opprobrium will do what he wants. Isn’t that rational, Socrates?
In the course of the Republic Plato will argue that not only do moral truths, when revealed as they really are rather than contextualized into a social construct, have the force to compel a rational person’s actions; but moral truths have the force to compel the rational arrangement for the polis, which will, in turn, help promote the good behavior of its citizens. The good polis is made by the good person, his moral character intact, and the good polis, in turn, helps turn out good persons, their moral characters intact. Plato goes a very far distance in the Republic beyond both the nihilism of Thrasymachus and the social constructivism of Glaucon.
And Plato has his older brother stay around for the long haul of the Republic, becoming Socrates’ yes-man during the course of the famous Myth of the Cave (514a–520a) and receiving Socrates’—and so Plato’s—final benediction in the closing lines of the Republic: “And so, Glaucon, the story wasn’t lost but preserved, and it would save us, if we were persuaded by it, for we would then make a good crossing of the River of Forgetfulness50 and our souls wouldn’t be defiled” (621b–c). Once again the story is brought round to death in relation to the question of what it is to have lived a life worth living. And one wonders how it felt for Plato to address such words to his older brother, who might well have been dead when Plato wrote them. Was the preserved “story” too late to save the brother whom Plato allows to gaze at the utopian vision he has Socrates construct of the kallipolis, the beautiful city, which is most decidedly not Athens? Did Glaucon live out his life in keeping with what Plato had first had him argue, the view that only an idiot will let moral truth compel his actions and shape his life rather than the opinions that his fellow citizens have of him, his name on their lips, a person of substance in the agora and the Assembly, this older brother from whom Plato first heard tell of the man who devoted his life to trying to convince the fine proud citizens of his city that they all had no idea of what they were doing with their lives?
You will have noticed that I am putting Socrates’ questions—and thus the birth of philosophy as overseen by Plato—into a historical context, created by both the wider Axial Age’s preoccupation with existential dilemmas, and the Athenian response which grew out of its Homerically shaped ethos. I was trained as a philosopher never to put philosophers and their ideas into historical contexts, since historical context has nothing to do with the validity of the philosopher’s positions. I agree that assessing validity and contextualizing historically are two entirely distinct matters and not to be confused with one another. And yet that firm distinction doesn’t lead me to endorse the usual way in which history of philosophy is presented. This consists of an idealized conversation between philosophers—Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Augustine and Aquinas, and Descartes and Spinoza and Locke and Leibniz and Berkeley and Hume and Kant and … The philosophers talk across the centuries, exclusively to one another, hermetically sealed away from any influences derived from non-philosophical discourse. The story is far more interesting than that.
A distinction that the philosopher of science Hans Reichenbach introduced has always seemed a very useful one to me in keeping the two sets of questions—historical influences and assessments of validity—unconfused. Reichenbach distinguished between, on the one hand, “the context of discovery” and, on the other, “the context of justification.” When you ask why did some particular question occur to a scientist or philosopher for the first time, or why did this particular approach seem natural, then your questions concern the context of discovery. When you ask whether the argument the philosopher puts forth to answer that question is sound, or whether the evidence justifies the scientific theory proposed, then you’ve entered the context of justification. Considerations of history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology are relevant to the context of discovery, but not to justification. You have to keep them straight, though sometimes relations between them can be established that are helpful. Sometimes, for example, examini
ng the context of discovery can help flush out unstated premises in an argument, presuppositions that were regarded as so intuitively obvious in the context of the thinker’s mind-set, whether for cultural reasons, personal reasons, or the interactions between the cultural and the personal, that they didn’t bear being stated. But still the assessment of those intuitions in terms of the argument’s soundness isn’t accomplished by work done in the context of discovery. And conversely, one doesn’t diminish a philosopher’s achievement, and doesn’t undermine its soundness, by showing how the particular set of questions on which he focused, the orientation he brought to bear in his focus, has some causal connections to the circumstances of his life. In a previous book, I tried to show how the circumstances of Spinoza’s life—in particular, his being a member, until the age of twenty-three, of the Jewish-Portuguese community of Amsterdam, all of whom were refugees from the Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition, which was raging at the time—influenced his radically rationalist approach in philosophy, and in particular his preoccupation with the issues of personal identity. Some readers so confused the context of discovery and the context of justification, thinking I was perhaps arguing that Spinoza’s philosophical positions were groundless because his personal history helped determine which problems he set out to solve—that I thought it might be useful to articulate Reichenbach’s distinction here. There’s a golden mean to be struck between the extremism of historicism, on the one hand, and the extremism of philosophical insularity, on the other, and Reichenbach’s distinction helps to dissolve the false dichotomy.
Plato at the Googleplex Page 20