Lies and Fabrications. The Cognitive Potential of Pseudos in Plato’s Republic

Dorota Zygmuntowicz

doi:10.31261/fp.8517

Abstract

In this article, I pose the question of what the role of the pseudos theme is in the entire argument of the Republic, which is motivated by a challenge from Thrasymachus, who defined justice as “the advantage of the stronger/ruler.” How can the “beautiful polis” (Kallipolis), based on a “noble falshood” addressed to its rulers in particular, be a good counterargument to the realist Thrasymachus? I show that Plato, wanting to prove that Thrasymachus’s thesis is too narrow and only seemingly realistic description of political reality, explicitly uses the same tool that implicitly lies at the root of the worldview expressed in the rhetorician’s thesis: ideological falsehood. He opposes the ugly ideology (the advantage of the stronger) with a “noble falsehood” (the dogma of love), since falsehood as such is an indispensable structural element of the polis itself, resulting from the weakness of the faculty of reason proper to the human condition. The pseudos theme has a dual function in the Republic: heuristic and structural. First, Plato exposes the implicit ideological falsehood underlying Thrasymachus’s realistic thesis using a falsehood that he [Plato] himself has explicitly proposed. Second, he presents falsehood as a component of the political, which compensates for human ignorance and exploits human susceptibility to normative and cultural implementations.

Highlights

Alethiological BiasThere are names that are more repulsive than the things and phenomena they designate, especially if you are unaware that these objects are referents of those names
At the very beginning of the Republic, Socrates deals with a position that “so ”1 identifies justice with telling the truth and giving back what has been taken
In response to Socrates’s characteristic hesitation, Glaucon outlines the profile of Socrates’s current listeners — Plato’s “ideal readers”: “your audience won’t be without judgment, or distrustful, or illwilled” (450d3—4). Bearing in mind such listeners in particular, Socrates, safeguarding himself by taking on the attitude of an unbeliever and inquirer, raises the question of why the community of women and children makes them laugh, and this “even more than what we went through before” (450c7) — meaning the “noble falsehood.”61 By suggesting that laughter is evoked by what is contrary to our habits (452a), which we mistakenly identify with our nature (456c), he raises the problem of what ideologies our flexible human nature can accommodate

Summary

Introduction

There are names that are more repulsive than the things and phenomena they designate, especially if you are unaware that these objects are referents of those names. Plato ends Socrates’s discussion with Polemarchus with a negative conclusion typical for elenctics: justice is not what the decent Cephalus thought in accordance with the tradition of wise poets; Cephalus — the current testator for Polemarchus and potential testator for Plato’s generation, which — after the demoralizing Peloponnesian War that exposed the face of justice as advantages for the stronger party15 — wants to redefine it, with a look to its own moral and political advantages In this delicate situation of inheritance, negative conclusions are more desirable than assertions. Though the content of his thesis may be a slogan based on Thucydides’s account, already reflected in or in the process of being grounded in the views of, among others, Antiphon, Critias, Polos, and the mysterious Callicles from the Gorgias, in the version Plato attributes to Thrasymachus, famous for his precision and brevity, it has such distinctive qualities that one can assume that Plato sharpens what is most intriguing to him personally in his caricatured distortion. In response to Socrates’s open question containing the phrase “what else ...” (ti allo ...), the closed answer “nothing other than ...”

17 Respectively: Plato

Conclusion

80 These descriptions are taken from