The Good in Plato’s Republic
The dialogue actually dramatizes three main conceptions of the Good, as Benefit, Reputation, and Pleasure. The characters dramatizing the various aspects of these main conceptions necessarily cannot state Plato’s own position on the Good. The analogies are worse than a first-year student’s essay on the subject.
The following extract considers how the demand to know Socrates’ own opinion helps set up the famous analogies of the Good.
What is the Good?
Adimantus […] timocratically asks for Socrates’ own view of the Good. Astonishingly, he asks Socrates whether he claims that the Good is epistêmê or pleasure, or something else (b2–4). Although Socrates has already refuted these two commonly held positions, he pretends to approve of Adimantus’ unwillingness to be satisfied with what appears to others. Adimantus replies that it does not seem to him right for one who can say the opinions of others not to say his own opinion, although busying himself with these things for so long. He is of course speaking as a timocrat, and is not talking about himself but about Socrates. Socrates also refers to the opiner in the third person, anticipating some of the things he will address in the analogies concerning the difference between knowledge and opinion. Adimantus and the others, however, are allowed to infer that Socrates is attempting to get out of having to provide an account of the Good which he says they can obtain from others. This is the hook Socrates uses to reinvolve Glauco, the upward-looking timocrat, in the conversation, to be his interlocutor for all three analogies involving the Good. Glauco plays his part as the master of ceremonies by declaring that he and the others will be satisfied with an account of the Good just like the previous account of the virtues (506d1–5). Accuracy may not be high on the timocratic list of priorities, but a good story is.
Extract from Chapter 6, ‘The Digression’, in Ivor Ludlam (2014), Plato’s Republic as a Philosophical Drama on Doing Well, pp. 183–184.
For more details, click here.
