ABSTRACT
THE Republic opens with a request for a definition of δικαιοσνη, and the first book clarifies the nature of this request. The definition of justice as “telling the truth and paying one’s debts” is rejected, not only because it may sometimes be right to withhold the truth or not to return what one has borrowed, but because no list of types of action could supply what Plato is demanding. What he wants to know is what it is about an action or class of actions which leads us to call it just. He wants not a list of just actions, but a criterion for inclusion in or exclusion from such a list. Again, a definition of justice as “doing good to one’s friends and harm to one’s enemies” is rejected not just because of the argument that to harm someone would be to make him worse –that is, more unjustwith the consequence that the just man would be involved in making men less just, but because any definition of justice in terms of “doing good” and the like is bound to be unilluminating. When Thrasymachus comes upon the scene he tells Socrates that Socrates is not to offer him a definition which tells him that justice is “the same as what is obligatory or useful or advantageous or profitable or expedient.” Socrates retorts that this is like asking what 12 is and refusing to accept any answer of the form that it is twice 6, or 3 times 4, or 6 times 2, or 4 times 3. But Socrates does accept the task of offering a quite different kind of elucidation; it would be a mistake to suppose that when Socrates does offer us a formula, namely that justice is that state of affairs in which everyone has regard to his own concerns, this is in itself the answer that was being sought. This formula is unintelligible apart from the rest of the Republic, and Thrasymachus is right to suppose that the search for expres-sions synonymous with δικαιοσνη would not be to the point. For to be puzzled about a concept is not like being puzzled about the meaning of an expression in a foreign language. To offer a verbal equivalent to an expression about whose meaning we are conceptually puzzled will not help us, for if what we are offered is a genuinely synonymous expression, then all that puzzled us originally will puzzle us in the translation. To understand a concept, to grasp the meaning of an expression, is partially, but crucially to grasp its functions, to understand what can and cannot be done with and through it. Moreover, we cannot decide what words are to mean, or what role concepts are to play, by fiat. We may on occasion wish to introduce a new concept and so legislate as to the meaning of a new expression; but what we can say in a given situation is limited by the common stock of concepts and the common grasp of their functions. No objection to the Republic is therefore more misconceived than that which would have been made by Humpty Dumpty (“When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less”)14 and which was in fact made by Professor Karl Popper when he wrote, “But was Plato perhaps right? Does ‘justice’ perhaps mean what he says? I do not intend to discuss such a question. . . . I believe that nothing depends upon words, and everything upon our practical demands or decisions.”15 The point I have tried to make is that only those demands and decisions are open to us
which there are concepts available to express, and that therefore the investigation of what concepts we either must or may use is crucial.
