Exploring Plato's Republic

Exploring Plato’s Republic

(351) Exploring Plato's Republic - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI1cugtbTCY

Transcript

(00:00) So tonight we're talking about Plato's Republic, exploring Plato's Republic. One of the cautions that I always make is that my background is in history, and so whenever I approach philosophy, it's usually through the lens of a historian or historian of philosophy. Therefore, it becomes a bit of a second language to me, especially as you get older and your brain is less malleable and less able to cram all these things in. But I will do my best, and I appreciate all of your comments as we move forward with this together. The Republic is among Plato's most influential works in history. It is among his best-known works today. It hasn't always been the work he's most famous for, but now it is. It was published in the fourth century BC, and I think it continues to present ideas that are part of our conversation now and continue to be challenging, at the very least foundational for how we view some of our most important questions about meaning today. I find that actually, in reviewing for this lecture and rereading it, it's sort of amazing how many very famous things are crammed into this one document, this one dialogue. It's the kind of thing that happens when you go back to Shakespeare; you realize that every single line he's ever said is either a title of a movie or a song because all these have become our quotable quotes. One of the most famous things found in the Republic is Plato's famous allegory of the cave. We've actually had an entire lecture devoted to this before, but it comes up all the time whenever anybody's talking about philosophy. So if you just briefly mention the idea of it here, the allegory is that people in life are like prisoners chained in a cave. They're looking essentially at a wall where they're watching a shadow show of shadow puppets. Because of their binding, they can't actually look around and see where the light is even coming from. The light itself is only coming from a candle, and the reflection is again only giving them a sense of activity, but that's all they know. In other words, that's all of the physical reality they have access to, this shadowy world of shadow puppets. Now, what if one of them were freed and they saw that, and moreover, they even ascended out of that cave into what we understand to be the real world and see the actual sun? On the one hand, how painful would it be to their eyes to try to even adjust to it? How painful would it be to realize that everything they'd known had been just an illusion when they see actual reality? And then how much they might want to go back and tell the fellow prisoners about what the true reality is, and how unlikely those guys would want to even listen to that. That's essentially an analogy of the philosopher who has now looked beyond what Plato believed in the material world, which is functionally just as unreal as shadows. In fact, there is a real world of ideas that we can think of analogously, like things like mathematics. In other words, the Earth is not a perfect sphere, or even attempting to be a perfect sphere, but there is mathematically the idea of a perfect sphere that can be described in math but can't exist in reality. So that perfect world of thought, the intelligible world, is the real world of ideas, as Plato's argument goes. It's essentially flipping that on end about what almost anybody thinks generally, especially in modern times where we have all sort of become materialists, where the only thing that matters is matter and that ideas are immaterial often in our present modern philosophy. Okay, that's just one of the things, the cave. What else is in the Republic? Another one of these things that's maybe a little less famous in terms of the story or the analogy of the divided line, but what comes out of that is a description of Plato's theory of the forms or the universal ideas. I put on here all the different platonic solids because Plato likes those. Again, we're talking about that math, but also I put on here just the image of the form of the chair because, for whatever reason, people always use the chair as the example. Every chair that we have, all these chairs that you're sitting in, are just physical manifestations of a chair, each of which is imperfect as opposed to the real true form of a chair that exists in the ideal realm that Plato thinks is the most important realm. Whereas all these little physical chairs that you have are just temporary, imperfect versions of a chair, which will ultimately presumably make their way to a recycling bin or whatever is going to happen to them someday in the future. They're pretty new right now, but eventually they won't be. Anyway, the idea of the forms, right? The metaphor of the sun, the idea that just as there is this thing in the physical universe that provides all of the light and warmth for our cosmos, our solar system, in that same exact way, then in this universe, as far as Plato's concerned, this universe of the forms, there is one ultimate form, there's one prime oneness that is at the center of everything that is both the cause of everything else and that everything else in that way is dependent on the same way the sun is. That form for Plato is the good or good for goodness' sake, that kind of thing. So this analogy of the forms would... whatever comment... no, you're just holding the microphone, okay. The idea of the philosopher king, you probably have heard of philosopher kings. So yeah, like they got one in the U.S. now apparently. No, wait, no, that's not it, that's not the idea. The metaphor of the ship of state, you might have heard this. I just googled it and I found a couple, you know, just in present-day news of, I don't know, United States and Britain's, I don't know, analogy is that the state is a ship, the leader is the pilot of the ship, and this kind of thing in it, and it's contemporary cartoons. So the idea of the ship of state is still present with us from the Republic. Again, the noble lie, the idea that there could be a good end to a pious fraud. I have here a picture of the Ark, and so one of the pious frauds that we've talked about in previous lectures, and actually we're going to talk about when we're talking about who wrote the Old Testament at some point, or rather we have in the book of, it's recorded that the scribes went into the area where the Ark is kept in the temple, and they found a scroll, a scroll of the law that nobody had ever seen before. When they read it, it contained a scripture that nobody had ever heard before, and when the king read it all and realized all the things and all the laws that they hadn't been doing, you know, he rent his garments and was in mourning, King Hezekiah, I think. And so when that all happened, that became the basis for the monolithic reforms that essentially become what we think of as first temple Judaism. So the idea is that somebody found a book, the book of Deuteronomy, which hadn't been known before at all, which claims to have been written by Moses, but which we can say quite clearly is not written by Moses, was probably written around the time historically that it was found in the temple at that time. But it created this whole movement upon which really the entirety of Abrahamic religion, Islamo-Judeo-Christianity, in some sense has as its foundation. It's not the only example of that, but anyway, there's lots of different ideas. Socrates, Plato, through the mouth of Socrates, argues in his Republic here that it's going to be essential to tell a couple of noble lies in order to achieve the good end of the just society. The myth of Er, you might not have heard this one, I don't know, but I think it's kind of an interesting one anyway. The idea in it is Plato tells a story of the afterlife where you are judged according to what you did in your life, and based on how you lived your life, you're either sent to a kind of holding pen paradise or reform school. Essentially, you spend a thousand years in one of those two pens, and if you've been in the paradise one, you get that because you were so good in life. But then once you have spent a thousand years just kind of in paradise, you forget all the good things that you know, the reason that got you there in the first place. So then when you're reincarnated, so after that thousand years you're reincarnated and sent back to Earth, you end up being quite dumb and doing all the wrong things, and then you go the wrong way in the cycle. Likewise, if you get all this punished, you get that being rotten beat out of you, you come back and you live a really good life. So this cycle goes on until you accidentally, let's say, if the thing works out and you end up becoming a tyrant on the Earth life, whereupon you just get flushed down the drain at the end instead of getting reincarnated or put in prison and things like that. So the worst thing you want to happen to you is to have lived a noble life, to have forgotten it all because of this thousand years of paradise, become a tyrant, and then that's the end of you according to this particular myth in Plato. So it's an interesting idea anyway about reincarnation, about judgment after life and things like that, which is again four centuries before, for example, Christianity and the ideas of afterlife and somewhat contemporaneous to this idea of reincarnation is emerging in South Asia in terms of South Asian Indian religions. The Ring of Gyges, you may not have heard it in the form of as it's told in the Republic, but the idea of somebody getting a hold of a magic ring that when you put it on, you turn invisible. You've probably heard some stories about a magic ring that makes you go invisible, whether or not you've heard about Gyges. The question that is brought up in this kind of thought experiment that Plato has in the Republic is how would you behave if nobody could ever observe what you were doing? So would you use an invisibility ring to be a superhero who's doing all these good Wonder Woman or Superman-style heroism, or would you kind of quickly start spying on people, see what they think about you, maybe steal some stuff, all the different kinds of things? The argument is that when you're kind of choosing superhero powers, anyway, Plato's argument is that you're not going to do pretty well when you have this one in terms of being just. Finally, this thought experiment of a utopia, so the idea that probably thinking about when you hear the name the Republic is Socrates kind of trying to paint a thought picture of how would a perfect society be. This is really one of the very early times that that's happened. Later ones that we're familiar with, Thomas More's Utopia, so that coins the term utopia for these things, are definitely written having been familiar with Plato's work. That has created whole genres of both utopian literature and then as we come into the post-modern realm in the second half of the 20th century and to the present, especially dystopian, because we've become, what's this, utopia? Yeah, it's just, it's Toronto right now. No, I was going to say, what do we know about what does a utopian society look like? We know there's more transit, right? At the minimum, we would definitely have that relief line, that's for sure, and that would there be a subway station. The relief line is supposed to have a subway station right here, one block away, so someday, utopia. Okay, so we always use our graphic that we advertise this meetup. We'd use this painting by Raphael in the Vatican called The School of Athens, where Raphael has combined all of these different philosophers from ancient Greece, but then actually all the way up through the Middle Ages to be all together in this picture. It represents then Western philosophy as it was understood and inherited by people at Raphael's time of the Renaissance. Right at the heart, it focuses on Plato and Aristotle, but also includes earlier philosophers like Socrates and the pre-Socratics and people like Boethius and Averroes. We've had a lecture on Boethius, we'll have to do Averroes, so we have to do the Western dependence on medieval Muslim philosophy, which ends up being a very important contribution. In this painting, at the center, Plato is pointing upward towards the heavens, which in this way he's modeling, therefore symbolically caricaturing his idea of ideals or forms. We're not worrying about the material world, we want to look upward and have our eyes gaze upward to the ideas of forms. That's this theory of forms that we talked about as more accurate reality than the material world that we tend to think of as reality. For Plato, these forms are atemporal, aspatial, immaterial, perfect, and material objects by contrast that we can sense are just mere reflections or shadows of these forms. By contrast, right next to Plato in this painting, we have Aristotle with him represented here, his empiricism. He's kind of going, "Whoa there, Plato," on the one hand, but he's also gesturing to the ground, you know, in the physical world all around him because he's essentially arguing with Plato that we should be grounding our philosophy a little bit more in the real world. We can maybe get to those ideas, but we have to first do our essentially legwork here in the material world, see what the material world has to teach us and how that can then maybe allow us to extrapolate to these ideals instead of simply rejecting the material world and just using our minds only. So breaking with that knowledge comes through the deduction of abstract forms, Aristotle argues empirical study of physical things yields knowledge about their underlying causes and purposes, so we should be studying the world around us. Just as a background for these guys, if you're less familiar, Plato was the greatest student of Socrates. He essentially creates the Western dialectical philosophy, which is modeled on Socrates' habit of asking difficult questions, so what sometimes you think of as the Socratic method of trying to inquire about what is the nature of a particular topic, trying to find a definition, trying to then challenge the definition through finding counterexamples that don't fit into that definition, refining your definition, and trying to come to some understanding, but in the form of a dialectic or dialogue so that it's not simply like the way Aristotle would write things. He would simply write a treatise, there's a topic, he tells you what it is, rather than having books on absolutely every topic in the universe like Aristotle, and then just explaining what it all is. Rather, it's engaging you, the reader, with the philosophical process and essentially an ongoing exploration in order to try to find meaning together, which maybe can't be limited to simply what you would write in a thesis statement. Because Socrates didn't write any of these things down and actually was quite dubious about the value of the written text, Plato did that, and so he's therefore the innovator then of these written dialogues that convey philosophical questions and modeled on Socrates. He himself founds a school, which is called the Academy, and our word "academy" is in homage to Plato's original Academy, and his famous student is Aristotle, who we've been mentioning. Aristotle, then Plato's greatest student, he systematized knowledge in just crazy wide-ranging fields: physics, biology, logic, politics, linguistics, metaphysics, etc., etc. There's a precursor, kind of the ancient idea of a scientific method, which is not quite what the modern idea of the scientific method is, but again, this empiricism. His school is called the Lyceum, which we use that word less in English, but it's a French word for school, for example, it's the main word. But anyway, you're probably used to the word Lyceum, and again, it's in honor of Aristotle's school. Famously, then, Alexander the Great, he's a tutor for Alexander, who doesn't go on to be a philosopher, but is kind of a hands-on guy who decides to take this out of the Academy or out of the Lyceum and into the real world and see what you can do with all of this information that they've come up with. We'll just step back then to Socrates. Socrates is also in the painting here, but he's not right at the center of it. Somebody who obviously is hugely influential on both Plato and then through Plato, Aristotle. Philosopher, so philosopher is a lover of Sophia, which is one of the Greek for wisdom, but is also a female goddess, so it's a female divine, and is credited then with this Western philosophical tradition as the first moral philosopher. His predecessors, because of the importance of him historically speaking, are termed essentially pre-Socratic. In other words, the people who came before Socrates are especially concerned with questions about what they called at the time natural philosophy, which would be more like what we think of as being cosmology or science and things like that, what we now think of as physical science. Socrates, now having so many people had that question, turns it on to let's look at some of these more metaphysical or human questions, moral questions. As I mentioned, he left no texts, but he definitely walked around and bugged everybody in Athens. One of the things is he would ask questions like, "Well, what does it mean to live a good life? What is the virtuous life? What are the qualities of that?" Ultimately, he's tried by a jury that's set up by the Athenian democracy on charges that include things like corrupting the minds of youth and also impiety. He is convicted and executed. Part of the story and history of Socrates, especially as recorded by Plato, is that he could have gotten away if he had wanted to, but that he chose to be subject to the law and to essentially face death stoically and actually becomes a model for the Stoics in a way by also illustrating in his view that even though people generally tend to really fear death, that he feels anyway that a philosopher doesn't need to be worried about death because we don't have any evidence that you're going to be tortured in these horrible ways. Maybe you can just as easily, if you're going to make a leap of faith to think that that's going to happen, you can just as easily believe that some kind of something will happen that would be quite absolutely wonderful. If Plato's characterization of what Socrates' beliefs are, his idea is that by participating in that ultimate form, the form of the good, goodness itself, that one essentially is returned to union with that one source in death, and so therefore death is not anything to be worried about. Yes, Socrates drank hemlock. The way the execution took place is he's sentenced to death, and so they do it death by poison. He's able to drink the poison hemlock, not that he drank it in advance of being condemned. He did not do it in advance of being condemned. It's not just like to spite him, like they were going to cut his head off or something like that. He drinks the poison as part of his sentence. It's not like, "Oh, I'll show all of you. I'll kill myself with poison when you wanted to hang me or something." No, they execute him. They sentence him to execution by poison, and he takes the poison. There's a lot of different... We've talked before, especially when we've done a later generation of classical philosophy. Right now, we're at the start of classical philosophy after the pre-Socratics, and so this is this golden era. When we've done later classical times, so the Roman imperial times and what we sometimes call later Greco-Roman... I have Mormon on my brain here. Greco-Roman philosophy, moral philosophy. Now that I said that, I remember what I was going to talk about. A lot of those later philosophies, especially Stoicism and things like that, some of these Stoic values are things that continue to resonate on through Western society. We still look back on people being Stoic or something like that as being a virtue. One of the main exceptions to that generally speaking in Western society is that the Stoics were very much on board with, at certain points, for your honor or this or that, you're in a place where you really ought to honorably commit suicide. People like Cato, who is a very famous... I think he's a Stoic, but anyway, a very famous Republican member of the Republic of the Senate in Rome at a certain point, because of political causes, feels that he has to commit suicide and does. I think stabs himself, not poisons himself. That's just viewed as a very, very honorable thing to do, and so that he's a martyr in that same way. Same thing, Socrates. That's one big one that hasn't resonated down, where we don't generally look upon this honorable suicide in the West, but most of the rest of Stoicism has made its way down. The one thing about Socrates' death, though, is that I think it was 101 or 501 jurors that were all responsible for sentencing him. Even though they came up with the sentence of guilty, the tradition was that he could ask for a lesser sentence. Instead of asking for the lesser sentence, he went with something outrageous that they wouldn't ever grant him, so they just sentenced him to death. It kind of looks like it could be like that with valor. In a way, it's kind of like just kicking. He's kind of saying, "Well, look, I'm not guilty, so he's not going to take any of the easy ways out. If you guys are going to go down and do this thing where you're charging me and you're going to use your powers in a democracy in order to do this, I'm not going to play the little game and take all the different ways that I have as an out on this, where I just accept having a slap on the wrist and agree, therefore, that I was in the wrong, like what you're really kind of trying to do. Instead, I'm going to stand for my principles and say I'm in the right, even if that means that you're going to execute me. Then if you have that conviction as the Athenian democracy, if the state has that conviction, then he'll accept that. Then history will then judge whether they think Socrates was right or whether they think the Athenian democracy was right. He generally won that gamble in terms of in the courtroom of history, depending on how your view of life and death and whether you'd be better off not dying or not or whatever, that would be your... You can decide if you want otherwise. Yes. Well, if I remember correctly, I'm not sure about that, but there is the difference between sentencing and executing. The sentence and execution. They sentence him to death, but the execution is dubious because as far as I remember, it is almost like optional either to drink the poison or to escape from the prison. Yeah, he can run away. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he could have left. There's all the different ways that he could kind of say, "I'm going to abscond and I don't have to accept that kind of authority." Indeed, by the way, when we talk to two student generations later, Aristotle is like, "I'm out of here." When the politics were going wrong and suddenly Alexander's gone and his whole party is in bad stead, Aristotle chooses to flee rather than, and he says, "Rather than allow the Athenians to martyr, anyway, mar their reputation a second time by killing Aristotle, obviously, in addition to Socrates." So you can go either way on this, but Socrates made his bed and decided he wanted to do that. So anyway, okay, so let's go back anyway out of the historical Socrates here. Well, a little bit anyway to this method of the characters in Plato's dialogue. So we'll talk a little bit about the difference between Socrates, the character in the dialogues, and Socrates, the historical figure who we've been talking about. So the characters in Plato's dialogues then engage in conversations that explore big philosophical questions. So they can be questions like, "Okay, what is virtue?" which is the topic of the Meno, one of the dialogues, and "What is beauty?" which is the Hippias, the greater Hippias, the topic of that. And then other characters then will give traditional definitions often, which Socrates then will proceed to pick apart until they get really frustrated and sometimes they leave and that kind of thing, and then somebody else comes and there's more dialogue, right? And so that brings us to, like I say, the Socratic problem, which is Socrates, as we said, didn't write anything. Plato is our major source, and so we're primarily accessing Socrates through Plato, who is his own brilliant philosopher. And so often then what we have to ask ourselves is how much of what Socrates is saying in Plato's writings is what Socrates, the historical person, would have said, and how much of it is what Plato is saying as a developing philosopher in his own right throughout his own kind of brilliant career. And so in general, this can be argued forever, but a general rule of thumb kind of model that a lot of scholars go to deal with this problem is they divide the dialogues essentially into kind of three major groupings: early, middle, and late. And we can kind of, I'm just doing it with my little cartoons here, but essentially in the early, when Plato's new still and is still way more in the shadow of his brilliant teacher, he maybe is writing way more exactly what kind of Socrates would have been writing about. When we get to the middle dialogues, his own ideas have developed more and he's putting more of himself into what Socrates is saying in the dialogues. And by the end, we're probably hearing some things that would be quite anachronistic to Socrates. These are newer ideas that Plato has developed, even though they're still being put back into Socrates' mouth. And so the dialogue that we're doing today is right in the middle of that. So the Republic, like I said, it's around 380 BC or published. And Socrates in this is the major character, but a lot of the philosophy he's presenting here reflects Plato's thought as opposed to maybe what the historical Socrates is saying. We can't know just very easily. There are some other contemporaries. And so another student of Socrates, Xenophon, has written in his own dialogue and his own description of Socrates, who comes off quite different from Plato's Socrates. And also contemporaneous, we've done before when we had our lecture on Aristophanes, the clouds of this great originator of Greek comedy plays, wrote contemporary plays where he ridiculed Socrates miserably. And so you get a very different picture then of Socrates in the plays of Aristophanes. And so anyway, between those kind of different historical perspectives and some later stuff, those are the contemporaries, but then there's also later reflections. That's how we try to decide what is Plato and what's Socrates. So the dialogue here that we're dealing with tonight, the Republic, the big question is what is justice? Or at least that's the dialogue's overt question. It actually ends up having a bunch of related questions that are ultimately going to be, I mean, really, how do you live the best life? Or how do you live a just life? How do you live a good life? Can you live a good life? Is it a just life? So in this question then, what is justice? There's essentially a couple ways you can go with this in philosophy generally, not only just in Plato here, but also among the contemporaries. So one of these ideas is justice, supra-mundane. So we've already been talking about Plato's theory of forms and how there are ideas that transcend and are more ideal and real than the material world. So you can kind of guess which side Plato's going to come down on in terms of this. In other words, are these ideas like justice eternal and based on some higher standard or power? And if so, though, what is it and how do we understand what justice is and define it? Or is justice man-made? And if so, is it merely conventional? And maybe by merely conventional, we mean perhaps maybe arbitrary as it's developed just arbitrarily in all the different places where humans are, or as all the places it's developing, is there some kind of discernible basis for why different customs, even though they seem arbitrary, maybe they all have some logic to them because, for example, they have some essentially kernel of utility? Or is there something else? Like, for example, is the basis or the main underlying truth of the universe essentially power or kill or be killed kind of thing? And so then all of these customs have that as their kind of basis, even if that's not an eternal concept. And so one of the quests that people contemporaneous to Socrates are asking is this phrase, "Is man the measure of all things?" And so, in other words, if we look across the world, for example, at various religious precepts, some people oppose, for example, eating pork, some people oppose eating cattle, some people don't even eat onions, some people it's a big sin not to have coffee, you know? So, you know, if you take this kind of a gamut of, you know, things, for some people this is the end all, I'll be all, you know, no coffee. You know, is that, you know, is there any kind of universal sense that we can make of that, or is this, you know, arbitrary? So, contemporary to Socrates, one of these, another philosopher, a guy named Protagoras, is famous for this quote, "Man is the measure of all things." And so, as far as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are concerned, Protagoras and his associates are part of a school whom Socrates and Plato and Aristotle term sophists. Sophists becomes a very negative term in a lot of senses. So, Plato will argue that sophists are not philosophers or not true philosophers. In a lot of senses, it's hard to make this distinction. They are kind of a philosopher, depending on what you think a philosopher is. As far as Plato's concerned, Platonic philosophers are the real philosophers, and so these guys are not true philosophers. I mean, if we look at the other ideas from the outside, a lot of people can't see this. So, Aristophanes, as far as he's concerned, in the play "The Clouds," Socrates is a sophist, you know, and he is doing exactly the same thing that the sophists are doing. So, anyway, so this is kind of like a little bit of name-calling. But we tend to use this term because Plato and Aristotle, in a way, since at least back in their day, won, and so we call these guys sophists. So, sophists like Protagoras, like him, argue that, for example, all these relative customs that we see that we just went through in terms of dietary customs and other kinds of moral customs, we were talking before about societies where different kinds of suicide are honorable, other societies where they don't think that there is ever cause to commit suicide, or there may be any other number of moral ideas about suicide, that this illustrates that there's not any kind of absolute truth. Rather, so, for example, if we're looking at things that Aristotle and Plato see as qualities, things like warm or cold, that in fact there isn't anything that said that something is inherently warm. It is only simply relative. Something that you think is warm is only, it's maybe real warm here in Canada, but, you know, let's say in, I don't know, where I was in Arizona last week, so, you know, they won't think of it as that warm, right? So it's relative to, you know, other things, cooler things. So, by contrast, you know, into this position, then, there's no such thing as an absolute. Then, are there then such a thing as fundamental human rights? So, if we agree with the sophists, can we assert that any of human rights are fundamental? If customs and morality are relative, then what's the basis for declaring that particular laws are, let's say, rights in that, you know, fundamental sense, and that are fundamental to all human beings, right? And so, I think that maybe people are large in tension with these two extremes. You might have agreed with the sophists last slide. You might also have a tendency to think that some of the rights or something like that are, for humans, are fundamental, and some things are fundamentally immoral always. And indeed, almost all of functional society takes a middle path between these two and is actually pulling from both sides. But between, anyway, the sophists and Plato, there's not going to be a middle ground. You know, they want to argue both their own extreme on this. Okay, so we'll do the little bit. I just want to give a little sense of how dialogues go. And so I'm going to go in a little bit more detail to the first book of the Republic, where Socrates is setting this all up with his different dialogue partners, asking them questions and questioning them about what is justice. And so his first companion in the Republic that he's essentially, who actually, this guy brings up the topic of justice. It's an old man named Cephalus. He generally speaking is expressing a bunch of traditional Greek piety, Greek pagan piety that ancient Athenians would have had. And as far as he is concerned in his old age here, what's just for him is that he doesn't lie and he isn't cheating anybody. And most important, he's going to be able to die having paid off all his debts. So he's, you know, left that all behind him. So that's going to be, he'll have lived a just life, right? And so Socrates is like, hmm, you know, this is, you walk into Socrates' little trap there, Cephalus. So Socrates wonders whether, okay, is paying back what you owe, is that always just? You're defining that, you know, paying off your debts, that's just. But let's use, you know, a couple different counterarguments. I can think of an example here, Socrates says. Suppose that a friend, when he was in his right mind, had deposited arms, big weapons, with me, and then he asks them when he's not in his right mind. So then he goes out of it and he's nuts, and he asks for the gun back or whatever. Ought I to give the arms, should I give his weapon back? Nobody would say that I ought to give it back to him, or that it would be right for me to give it back to him, any more than that they would say that I ought to always speak the truth to somebody who's in that condition. So in other words, if this guy is nuts and dangerous, I should actually, if I have to tell him some white lies to calm him down or anything like that, nobody's going to call me a bad person for doing that. They're going to be happy that I calmed him down, even if it involved lying in Socrates' case. And maybe not everybody agrees, because later philosophers have argued that you can't ever lie, that's a moral absolute. But anyway, this is Socrates' case in this case. So giving something back isn't always good, because Socrates can poke a hole in that definition, as far as Socrates is concerned. So who's up next? So Cephalus decides that it's kind of out of his league. He didn't sign up for a big platonic dialogue, and so he leaves, and he leaves his young heir, Polemarchus, to the discussion. Polemarchus then jumps up and defines justice in kind of personal terms, terms that, as he's kind of thinking about it and living his own life, so he defines it as what's just is to help one's friends and harm one's enemies. So it's kind of utility, maybe. And again