Some Quirky Interpretations of The Republic, Part 1

Listened to Plato’s Republic, Part 1, over and over during several runs. Not the first time I'd listened to it, and I thought I should know it well enough that I’d squeezed all the knowledge out of it like the juice in a lemon. I hadn't.

On a run a few days before that, I listened to Chapter 1 of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. Something about Aristotle’s take on ethics, so much more rhetorical than philosophical—even though he writes eloquently about the “contemplative life”—made some of the dialogue in The Republic stand out from the rest, sort of like those "red letter" New Testaments that have all of Jesus's words in red ink. 

In the opening scene of The Republic, Socrates has just left the festival at Piraeus. While he walks back to Athens he is hailed and then joined by a group of friends. Most summaries of The Republic skip over the interchange. which appears to be nothing more than the sort of witty repartee Plato is so good at. One online reviewer, for instance, writes “The dialogue begins with the question ‘What is justice?’” not even allowing the opening dialogue place in The Republic. Most interpreters want to get right to the “meat” of the dialogue, the discussion of justice that comes later. 

Looking at this exchange, however, (or rather listening to it several runs in a row while under Aristotle's sway), I noticed how chocked full of meaning these words really are. Notice, for instance, that in the initial dialogue, Polemarchus, who want’s Socrates to stay until the evening festivities, says, “But do you see how many we are? And are you stronger than all these? For if not, you will have to remain where you are.” 

What a succinct definition of democracy from Plato's view. For those fiends of Socrates, and the people of Athens, democracy is simply the dictatorship of the majority, systematized, physical force. 

Socrates replies, “May there not be the alternative, that we may persuade you to let us go?” to which Polemarchus replies, “But can you persuade us if we refuse to listen to you?"

In this brief exchange, we can see a metaphoric narrative of the trial of Socrates, and the flaw both saw in democracy, (and that we see in elections today), that democracy is only possible when you listen to your opponent. There’s no question that in The Apology, many of Socrates’s arguments are so poor that one has to assume they were so on purpose. I had always assumed (I.E. I had no textual evidence) that he intended to loose. Now, I wonder. Perhaps the arguments he made were so starkly unpersuasive because he knew his audience would refuse to listen. So, he was going to tell them the truth, whether they listened or not.

Witty repartee, perhaps, but with a dark undercurrent, that like Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” may be missed if the reader is only interested in the serious stuff. 

Were these all too serious allusions intentional? If you adhere to the intentional fallacy, the answer has to be no. However, when I read Plato, I see a careful writer, one who is in control of his writing. (And here, Post-Structuralists may unite with New Critics against me.) However, I can’t escape the possibility, even the probability, that he wrote between the lines with a clear purpose, to stick it to the Athenians in such a way that only those who would listen could recognize.

The Contemplative Run

On the ten hour drive from McAllen to Dallas, I recently had a chance to stop for a couple of hours and run in Pedernales Falls State Park. I ran the Wolf Mountain Trail to Jones Spring.

Perhaps it was the evidence of settlers long gone, remembered only by the stone walls they built and short paragraphs about them in the park service brochures, but I found myself contemplative, perhaps at times, even morose. I wondered what Plato and Socrates would think about distance running on trails. In the opening of Phaedrus, Socrates mentions that he doesn't go outside the city walls often. He prefers to be where he can have conversation.

 I, on the other hand, like to get out where I can be alone. When I run I have time and room to think. I thought about Socrates's love of conversation. Of course, it was more than simple conversation, it was dialectic. The self-knowledge Socrates had, as well as knowledge about human frailties, not only requires the raw materials, the facts, but the time and space to think about those facts. Despite what he tells Phaedrus, Socrates needed time alone, time to think. We read in other places, for instance the story by Alcibiades, of Socrates standing still all night long while on a military campaign, thinking. It seems he has chosen his method of contemplation, I have chosen mine. 

Thought and Experience--What Running Can Teach Us

When he found out I had once spent almost 15 hours running a 50 mile trail ultra, my step father immediately asked what I did while running. What he really wanted to know was what I thought about. For him, as for so many people, thinking is something that happens outside, or at least, along side experience.

 One of the things I like best about running is that thinking connects to experience. The more I run, the more direct the connection. 

Most of us have had this experience: we finish a run and look back over the songs on our Pandora account, looking for the artist who sang this or that particular song. Looking back over the list we realize we didn’t hear most of the songs that had been playing. I sometimes find myself thinking, “That song? I love that song. I don’t even remember it.” What we’ve done is entered into a space where thought and experience are direct, no longer mediated.  Some call this a meditative state.

Sometimes, when I enter that space I find insights into problems that I have been wrestling with for months. Suddenly, I see the solution. Sometimes I find insightsI didn't even know I was looking for. They seem to come out of nowhere, even though I know they’ve been bubbling below the surface for a while

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Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about The Apology of Socrates and its possible intersection with pragmatism. The other day while running silent, (no music, not books on tape), it suddenly occurred to me that Socrates had been accused of believing in strange gods and leading the youth astray. In other words, he wasn’t teaching the orthodox line in Sunday School. 

A few years before, I would have thought it barbaric, even medieval to think that someone could be condemned to death for the wrong theology. The Inquisition was a think of the past. That was before Al Queda and the Westboro Baptist Church. 

Things haven’t changed as much as we’d like.   

Socrates a Pragmatist?

Perhaps the place where Plato/Socrates is the most pragmatic in The Apology, and by most, I mean the place where he is philosophically pragmatic is during the sentencing phase. 

Socrates has been convicted, but no penalty has been exacted. Meletus, his accuser, asks for death. Socrates is then asked to suggest a punishment he deems suitable. After musing about several alternatives, one of the most satirical passages in all the dialogues, Socrates weighs them against death and asks, “When I do not know whether death is a good or an evil, why should I propose a penalty which would certainly be an evil?” About as pragmatic a question as one could ask—at least philosophically.  

Philosophically, according to James  “The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable” (Pragmatism 25). What is the question Socrates just asked but interminable, that is, unanswerable? After he has been condemned, Socrates riffs on death at length:  

“Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: - either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others.”

This passage sounds like James’s well known metaphor about the squirrel and the tree. (A man is on one side of a tree; a squirrel on the other. As the man tries to go round the tree to see the squirrel, does he go “round the squirrel or not?” (Pragmatism  25). James’s answer is to long for a blog. We’ll just summarize him by paraphrasing his take on the pragmatic method: It’s the same whether the man goes around the squirrel or the squirrel goes around the man. So, why worry about it. 

Though I self-identify as a pragmatist, I find James’s stance troubling, since I am prone to tell students in advanced writing or theory classes that the only questions that really interest  me are the ones that don’t have an answer, that are, in fact, interminable.

Socrates’s musing about death help me see that those unending questions, while unanswerable, are not metaphysical but pragmatic, because as Socrates realized, they govern how we act. Had he feared death, he would have acted much differently in The Apology than he did. Something he himself points out.

Those interminable questions are about what Socrates referred to as “virtue” and virtue affects us every day at the street level.