The Obscurity of Benefit as the Proper Context for the Question of Wealth

image © Marie-Lan Nguyen
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This post is part of a series on
Plato's Republic. It can stand
alone, but is intended to
continue the line of
thinking summarized here.

Last week, I said that in order to see the substance of Socrates's argument in opposition to Cephalus (and so to see the difference from the contentious sophists and debaters from whom Socrates is to be distinguished), we would have to ask how Cephalus's unstated opinions about justice obstruct his view of the benefit of wealth. We should expect that it would be easier for Cephalus not to see benefit itself than to make a miscalculation about money.

In fact, if we follow up on Socrates's refutation as it is developed in the ensuing conversation with Cephalus's son, Polemarchus (not to mention Thrasymachus, we do find that benefit, especially with regard to the possibility of being mistaken about it, is a crucial turning point in the question about justice. According to Polemarchus, the hard cases of justice in which it supersedes the determinations of legal property are governed by the principle that "friends owe it to their friends to do good for them, never harm," and that justice "gives benefits to friends and does harm to enemies." So you would not give a deposited weapon back to an enraged friend because you know it would not benefit him but harm him to have it.

I just can't think about the
idea of the good when you
look at me that way.

But what is benefit? And who is a friend? Depending on the answers to these questions, justice could be marvelous and powerful or completely superfluous. We already want to benefit our friends; that's contained in our considering them friends. But justice must add something to the natural state of affairs, or everyone will be just except for a few fantastically twisted souls. (As Seth Benardete points out in Socrates's Second Sailing, this superfluousness of the just intention is what moves Socrates to construe Polemarchus's justice as an art — a method of application of the intention which we all in fact already have.) So the problem becomes one of identifying what it is that justice could know about friendship and benefit that we don't know just by wanting to benefit our friends.

Socrates's refutation of Cephalus does not turn explicitly on the question of benefit, but it does make clear that Cephalus cannot have seen the benefit of money, precisely in its relation to the idea of benefit, if he thinks that it facilitates justice by way of paying what is owed. For it equally facilitates injustice, if paying what is owed is sometimes unjust.

Thus the obstruction in Cephalus's view of the benefit of wealth is his own presumption of knowledge. He does not see benefit because he does not look for it in a place of darkness — in the field of his ignorance. Socratic wisdom is famously knowledge of ignorance. Here we see that this knowledge is a positive power, that orients the knower in the direction of what he would learn. To get the benefit of Cephalus's report, Socrates needs to place it in the light of something obscure. Benefit itself needs to be seen as something that somehow hides itself.

continued

Retractions

In reply to my questions about past love, minionofthepope writes:

But why is God dead at the end of your piece? The sentence makes me think I did not understand your post.

He is asking about the question, "How do you keep a promise to a dead god?" In putting this question, I seem to have fallen into (or fallen in love with) a way of talking that I don't understand and which in the past I myself have questioned. Now, I am like a fool who cannot even say what made him say what he said. It strikes me now as empty. Yet, I cannot persuade myself (is this just pride?) that I was a fool to say it.

Can we take this change as a case in point? Was there a god here making me say things I did not understand? Then where is that god now? If it is gone and dead, how can it have been a god? Certainly, it is not the God who "at every time and in every place,...draws close to man" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1). By withdrawing from me after exacting my promise it has withdrawn its right to be called a god. But a god does not change, so it never was a god. Never to have been a god: this is how a god dies.

Well, and if it is not that God beside whom we are to "have no other gods," why should I feel that I ought to remain faithful?

And so after many twists and turns, and feeling that I had escaped the danger, I find myself back in the same position as before, renouncing the unknown god.

Sound and Sound Judgment

Ashok Karra finds a conflict between civic and private virtue in the Seven Against Thebes. The Theban king Eteocles, he says, displays his civic prudence and "effectiveness in the public realm" in assigning the champion face each of the seven attackers led by his brother Polyneices. He rebuffs the attack through sound generalship, and thus also rebukes the fear of the women who were overwhelmed by the sound of the enemy's approach. The question, Ashok says, is not whether Eteocles as agent of the city has some right and mandate to pit himself against his brother; the question is "to what degree Eteocles’ effectiveness in the public realm threatens the very existence of the private."

His point, I take it, is that the threat to the city's existence justifies the city in sending Eteocles to face Polyneices, even if it does not justify Eteocles in fighting and killing his brother. But is not the destruction of family at the highest level of the city itself a more mortal threat to the city?

Eteocles chastises the women for taking the enemy approach too much to heart:

Chorus: The snorting of horses! There, I hear it.
Eteocles: Do not listen; do not hear too much.

If the assignments of the champions to the seven gates of the city proves Eteocles' prudence, then his prudence consists in not hearing too much, in refusing to take in the terrible flood of merely sensory presentation of danger:

No equipment of a man will make me tremble
Devices on a shield deal no one wounds.
The plumes and bells bite not without the spear.

The correlations which Ashok astutely observes between the emblems of the Theban defenders and those of the attackers work out Eteocles' philosophical policy of pitting being against seeming (Amphiaraus, the only attacker who is "best not at seeming to be such / but being so," is interesting as the exception). Something has purged Eteocles of pity and fear. It has made him a dangerous man. Inasmuch as the sound of jangling war-gear and beating hooves has lost its hold over him, he has become insensible as well to the threat of mutual fratricide, a greater danger to the city than even extinction. If the women hear too much, Eteocles does not hear enough. "Do you hear me or not?" he asks the women. "Or are you deaf?" But he has shut his own ears to the voice of pity, speaking poetically in the bells and plumes of the enemy outside the gates.

I said last week that I am inclined at times to pursue possible directions of thinking "methodically one at a time as they occur to me." I wonder now how I can have thought that made any sense.

For the time during which I pursued things as they occur to me, one could say that I was following a certain method. But this only proves that the meaning of the word "method" submits so pliably to philosophical extension that it can be applied easily to its opposite. The concept in that case disappears.

This "method" is the same as that to which I contrasted it: pursuing all the directions for thinking "in a frantic mixture."

Apparently my invocation of method was just a cover for my consummately frantic disposition.

I've about reached the end of what I can say about what it means to say that Aristotle does not think there is an art of the good life. Hopefully, yesterday's post made it clear that the important question is whether virtue can in any way be an art (techne), as opposed to some other spiritual activity. We won't get anywhere answering this question completely without a close reading of Book VI of Nicomachean Ethics and probably Book V, too.

For now, I just want to wrap this series up by pointing out that the very question about what spiritual activity constitutes virtue is dependent on Plato's philosophical findings as published in the Republic. Plato could still take it as a reputable opinion (endoxa) that virtue is an art. But he brings this opinion to the point of crisis through his account of justice. Book II , which obliquely introduces justice in the form of a division of labor, shows that art as an activity of the soul is subject to competition, not between artists but within each artist's soul; two arts in the same soul ruin each other. The discovery of this competition makes it impossible to think of virtue as an art.

Although, as we've seen, Aristotle starts his treatise on a dialectical ground of opinions, these probable starting points notably omit the formerly reputable opinion that virtue is an art. In this omission, which makes the inquiry of Book VI possible, Aristotle follows the thinking of Plato.

That is all I mean by "There can therefore be no art concerning the accomplishment of the human good, and that is just what Aristotle thinks." Admittedly, I wanted to mean more by it when I wrote it a few days ago, but perhaps I should say that I wanted to mean less, since I was thinking of an identity in the conclusions, and now I am thinking of an identity in the beginning, and of course the beginning is more than half the whole (as both Plato and Aristotle say).

Trying to say the impossible one more time

Allow me once again to repeat myself. I seem to have put things so badly in yesterday's post that a more thoughtful statement corresponding in nearly every point to my own intention could be brought against my statement as its negation.

It is exactly because the external view of tradition is my inheritance from the western tradition that I am loth to give it up, and why I cannot accept the necessity of abandoning the internal/external dichotomy as long as this necessity is interpreted as a mandate to roll back consciousness to a point before tradition came to be seen in an externally historical perspective. That is what I meant to say in point 2 of yesterday's post.

I also said yesterday that I am looking for a way to preserve the achievement of the western tradition in affording me the external view, while not being limited by the fact that this view, taken in itself, obscures any possibility of standing within tradition. I think my intention here was admirably paraphrased by pseudonoma as the pursuit of an "escape from the external view without deviating from its most proper intention and aim."

An impasse shows the way forward, because it shows what thinking still has to do. This is why an impasse is not a "dead end."

The Natality of Tradition, c't'd

In yesterday's posting, I was trying to explain why after saying that tradition is regarded internally "as the way it has always been (let "it" be what it may)," I felt it necessary to add "or at least the way it has been since before one's initiation into the field in which the tradition in question holds sway." The reason I gave was twofold: first of all, any description of tradition, from whatever point of view, has to take account of the fact that tradition may and perhaps must relate to a founding; secondly, in the light of a distinction between internal and external ways of encountering tradition, a distinction based on and itself reinforcing the external view, the interpretation of founding which most readily presented itself was an external one: that a founding is an action which invents and introduces a new way of doing things which subsequently catches on.

I have not yet given any reason for denying that this interpretation is the correct one. However, it is certainly incorrect to give it as part of the internal point of view. Now, the question naturally arises as to whether it is even possible from the point of view we have been taking so far, to give a correct statement of the manner in which the internal view would take account of the fact of a founding. I propose that this is not possible, and that the external view of tradition is not even capable of stating in any matter of fact way how founding is traditionally interpreted, let alone what founding is in truth.

The Natality of Tradition

I gave an incorrect description yesterday of the "internal" view of tradition. It should be obvious that an acknowledgment that things might once have been different and that one's initiation into the field could have been differently governed is already a transposition to the external view. However, this failed to be obvious to me, and I think the elusiveness of this fact had to do with two things: 1) It is not foreign to tradition (and may even be essential to it) to involve a relation to a founding, which means that the internal view can in some way involve a sense of a time before the tradition, and 2) the external view of tradition has such an overwhelming credibility, once it comes over the horizon, that the description of an internal view of tradition (which here means only a description of the negated other of the external view) cannot help being determined by the external.

The second of these things is a correlative of the problematic described at the end of yesterday's post: if the dichotomy between internal and external cannot be described from an internal point of view, without losing that point of view, neither can a correct description of the internal view be given from the external point of view.

As for the other point, I will have more to say tomorrow about the sense of a founding.