Week Six: PLATO
Polemarchus: The Socratic Attempt to Define Justice: Friends and Enemies — or Beyond Punishment?
October 17, 8 PM -9:30 pm
Plato’s Socrates addresses some of the same problems we examined in Homer, but with a radically new approach: dialectics rather than poetry. In the Republic, Socrates directly raises the question, what is Justice? He examines it first with Polemarchus, a young man who appears to share some of Achilles’ earnestness or righteousness; at any rate, Polemarchus surely is shocked at Socrates’ suggestion, inspired by Homer’s Odysseus, that justice is robbing and lying for the benefit of one’s friends (334a-b). Polemarchus is led, without qualms, to define justice initially as doing good to one’s friends and then harm to one’s enemies (332a-b). However, by the end of his exchange, Socrates has elicited from Polemarchus a definition of justice that transcends all vengeance and punishment: The just man must never harm anyone, not even his enemy (335e). How did this happen? What in Polemarchus’ heart, and in his (and our) beliefs about justice, lead him to this new and seemingly extreme (if not “nonsensical,” 336b) understanding? If we really believe, as Polemarchus does, that justice is “human virtue” (335c) — that is, the core of what it means to be a good person — then don’t we expect justice and the just person never to be the cause of harm to anyone? Don’t we expect justice to be good for the just themselves? But if justice is good for us — if it is in our true or genuine self-interest — then why would anyone be unjust, except involuntarily, out of ignorance? Would anyone rightly deserve to be punished or harmed for doing injustice—that is, for being ignorant? Or is justice something other than knowledge (of what is good)—i.e. is justice not an “art” (332c-334b)?