Friendship beyond Being in Plato’s "Republic"

• In Event: Friendship and Action in Conversation with the Ancient Greeks

Abstract

This paper considers the paradox in Plato’s Republic that the justice of kallipolis is predicated upon the proverb, “friends share all things in common,” but that sharing is in the good “beyond being.” The paper considers this paradox in light of four parts or episodes in the text: 1) the description of lovers of wisdom who seem to be more capable than any others to share the goods they love and to love one another; 2) the under-appreciated friendship that develops between Socrates and his sophist rival, Thrasymachus, which suggests that, like love, Nous conquers all; 3) the nature of kallipolis whose philosopher-rulers are compelled to suffer the injustice of having to rule because they, more than anyone else, understand that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it (this provision of rulers suffering injustice also inverts the common political practice that rulers usually exploit the ruled); 4) finally, Socrates narrates the drama of the night-long to an unnamed friend, the reader of the text that is the Republic. The act of reading the Platonic dialogue emerges out of the “erotics of recognition” between Socrates and the reader that draws the reader into the good “beyond being.” These four elements suggest how the trajectory of the drama and argument in the Republic points beyond itself, that the love of wisdom of the philosopher-rulers points beyond kallipolis (just as Socrates must bid farewell to Glaucon) and that the power they are forced to wield is not so much power but the power of powerlessness which is not fully acknowledged in the text itself. The Republic also seems to point beyond philosophy itself, towards what later thinkers would recognize as the horizon of faith, a point Socrates seems to intimate with reference to the good “beyond being” and by considering the just soul as superior to the “pattern laid up in heaven” that he seems to claim is the paradigm for the just soul and city (Rep. 592b).

Author

• John F. von Heyking, University of Lethbridge