In this section I will continue and conclude the discussion of the “rightly or beautifully” perplexity, but before I move forward, I want to make a small revision which may show even more the significance of the ambiguity of the word “peithesthai” which we discussed earlier. To supply the necessary context, let me start by repeating the second half of the preceding message. I will begin my repetition from the point where I returned to the quesion, “Why does Socrates attribute something to Polemarchus that Polemarchus plainly did not say?”

The context in which the misquotation occurs is strangely personal, at least it is immediate in the sense of “in person”. Most often, when a person is misquoted, the person who is misquoted is either not present or is not being directly addressed. But Socrates in this case doesn't misquote Polemarchus in a journal article or while talking to some third party. He misquotes him to his face. If you or I were in the position of Polemarchus, probably we would say out loud what we imagined saying as readers a moment ago: "Wait a minute! That's not what I said!" And very likely we would also ask, "Socrates, why did you put this word, 'rightly', into my mouth when you know it's not what I said?"

Later I will turn to why Polemarchus does not ask this question, but first let's try to imagine what Socrates might have said if Polemarchus had asked him this question. Wouldn't Socrates most likely say something like the following? "Well, I know you might not have used exactly that word, but I thought it was what you meant, and I still think it is what you would have to mean in this context." Polemarchus would reply, "What context are you talking about?" And Socrates would answer, "Just a moment ago you said that your father's formula 'certainly is' the definition of justice 'if Simonides is to be believed (or listened to or obeyed).' That's the context. When you said, '...if Simonides is to be believed,' I thought that raised the question, Why should Simonides be believed (or listened to)? And the only reason I could think of why somebody should be believed is that what he said is right. And since you clearly think that Simonides should be believed, I inferred from that that you must also think that what Simonides said about justice is right."

This is where I want to insert a little revision. You will notice that in the paragraph above, most of the times when I used the word “believed” I added, “or listened to or obeyed,” to keep present to our minds the ambiguity of the word “peithesthai” which we discussed previously. But you will notice that I was not consistent in doing this. The reason for that was partly that I was feeling that the repetition of this phrase might be stylistically tiresome for the reader. But there was also something else that was affecting my language but which I didn’t become fully conscious of until just now: I just now realized that I omitted the words “listened to” and “obeyed” from the last sentence because I had a vague feeling that those words didn’t work so well with the argument I was trying to make at that point. It’s easy to see that the argument about “rightly” works well enough if the question is understood to be about whether or not Simonides should be believed, because most people would agree that a pretty good reason for believing a proposition is that the proposition is right. So at this point we see again why the ambiguity of “peithesthai” matters. If we translate it as “listened to” and not as “believed” then we can imagine the conversation going this way: Polemarchus might say, “Socrates, if I say to you, “You really ought to listen to X when he plays the cithara,” would you think I was telling you that X plays rightly?” “Well, yes, I might think that.” “But, Socrates, would you really believe that that is the reason why I might think you ought to listen to X play the cithara?” “Well,” continues Socrates, “If X plays the music rightly, wouldn’t his playing sound beautiful?” “Maybe yes, and maybe no,” Polemarchus would answer, “And that’s just the point, Socrates. If the music is played beautifully, that’s what makes me want to listen to it, and that’s what makes me think that you will want to listen to it also — if you share my taste in music, that is. If his playing doesn’t strike me as beautiful, even if he plays all the notes “rightly,” I wouldn’t tell you that you ought to listen to it — provided that I think you share my taste in music.”

[This is where the last message ended.]

Now let me continue the inquiry into the strange contest between two adverbs, "rightly" and "beautifully."

The preceding example was intended to suggest that, according to Polemarchus, for people who share his taste, the words of Simonides about justice will be listened to, not necessarily because they are right, but because they appear to such people as beautiful. More generally, Polemarchus appears to maintain that the ground of justice is not some concept of what is right, but rather justice is grounded on a shared consensus about what is beautiful.

What does Polemarchus accomplish by shifting the terms of the discussion in this way? The main thing that Polemarchus accomplishes by attempting to ground justice in a consensus about what is beautiful is to put his position — or rather his father’s position — beyond the possibility, or necessity, of rational argument. And this answers the question I left open earlier about why Polemarchus does not ask Socrates why he had put the word “rightly” into his mouth even though he must have known that that is not what Polemarchus said. To ask such a question of Socrates would implicitly concede the relevance of rational argument, which is precisely what Polemarchus wants to avoid.

In addition this move by Polemarchus helps him to try to overcome a certain tension between his father’s position about justice and his own position, which, as we will soon discover, is not at all the same as his father’s. If justice is grounded in a consensus about what is beautiful, whose consensus are we talking about? There might be more than one possible answer to this question, but we will see that for Polemarchus it is clear that justice is grounded in the opinion that is common to friends. Is this the same as the “definition” of justice that Socrates extracted from Cephalus — that justice is telling the truth and giving back what one has received? Not at all! Cephalus seems, on the basis of the words that Socrates quotes, to hold a much more commercial or contractual conception of justice than his son.

So how can Polemarchus hold onto his own conception of justice while still defending his father? The answer is that Polemarchus doesn’t defend his father’s definition. He defends his father. He defends his father as himself, so his defense revolves around what they share, which is their intensely emotional response to the words of the poets that they find beautiful. When we read 331A we noticed the amazingly emotional response of Cephalus to what occurred to him as the beauty of the words of Pindar when he spoke of the good hope that was nourished in the mind of a man who was conscious of having committed no injustice. And for such a man, it seems, although the poet’s words may not precisely define justice, still they serve as a kind of motivation to be just in accordance with the common opinion about such things.

Now, in the light of the preceding analysis, let’s look at the relationship between this second entry of Polemarchus into the dialogue to the first entry with which the dialogue began. As I have remarked before, there is a tendency among readers, that we need to guard against, to forget about the context supplied by the opening confrontation between Socrates and Polemarchus. To the contrary, I want to suggest that with his return to the argument Polemarchus has brought us back to the place where we began, but at a different level.

The first confrontation was characterized by the threat of coercion combined with a refusal to listen. As I remarked earlier, the first confrontation was almost extra-political. Although it takes place in a polis, the interaction violates the presuppositions and requirements of the polis, which was the reason that I recalled the Melian dialogue from Thucydides. So here we saw one of the ways in which the problem of injustice manifests itself.

How can we say that we have now returned to the beginning? Because, if grounding justice in a consensus about what is beautiful puts the question of justice beyond the reach of rational argument, the practical result for Socrates is essentially the same as the declaration by Polemarchus that he could not be persuaded because he would refuse to listen. In the first case Polemarchus and his friends are unassailable because of the strength of their superior numbers. In the second case, their position is unassailable because of their agreement with each other as the more numerous group constituting the community.

In conclusion, I suggest that the action of the opening of the Republic is designed to introduce the question of justice by illustrating two fundamental ways in which the problem of injustice arises. The first is the injustice arising from the threat of coercion by superior force in the absence of a principle of equality before the law. The second source of injustice is that which arises when justice is grounded on the conventional opinion of the community about what is beautiful, as a result of which the community’s opinion about what is just is beyond the reach of dissent or rational argument.

I think it is easy to see that both of these sources of injustice are as familiar to us in the present day as they were in the time of Socrates — and we can also see that this second source is exactly what Socrates was contending with at the end of his life.

This, I believe, is what Plato was leading us to by inviting us to think about this strange shift from “rightly” to “beautifully.” There is much more that could be said on this subject, but I think it is now time for us to return to the text and to see how Socrates can manage to argue with someone who has put the foundation of justice beyond the reach of rational argument.

Lance