what’s in a name?

Probably many people have said this before, but it just occurred to me this past week as I have been teaching the dialogue under discussion.

The Platonic dialogue that we call the Republic bears the Greek title Πολιτεία (Politeia), which Allan Bloom suggests might best be translated Regime — or, periphrastically, “the organization of the polis.” But we do not know whether this is what Plato himself titled the dialogue or whether the title was provided by others. I suspect the latter, because I think Politeia is a singularly inapt title. Consider:

The dialogue begins with Socrates and friends (plus a rival or two) trying to decide what just action is. Does it consist, as Polemarchus says, in doing good to your friends and dealing out pain to your enemies? Or is it, as Thrasymachus says, nothing more than might-makes-right, the strong exercising power over the weak? Socrates, as is his wont, demonstrates the problems with both of these answers, but that doesn’t get anyone any closer to the correct answer.

So he makes the (rather strange) suggestion that because a city is something larger and more consequential than an individual, it might be helpful to ask what the Just City is — and then, if you can discern that, you can retrospectively apply that structure to individual persons. So off we go on a long — a very long — excursus on what a Just City would be and how you would build one.

But as the various arguments develop, Socrates keeps bringing his interlocutors back to reflection on the tripartite structure of the human soul: the rational part (logistikon), the spirited part (thumoeides), and the appetitive part (epithumētikon). He argues that just as the individual person should be governed by reason, so too the Just City will necessarily be governed by the philosopher, rather than the “spirited” warrior or the ordinary person driven here and there by his desires.

Increasingly, though, as we near the conclusion of the dialogue, the political concerns fade and Socrates shows himself concerned to demonstrate one final, absolutely essential triple argument:

A man will be just if he is governed by reason;

The true philosopher is the just man;

The just man is the happiest man.

“Happiness” here is eudaomonia, which philosophers these days, aware of the superficial character of most modern uses of “happiness,” have learned to call flourishing. The just man — regardless of whether he enjoys wealth and power or, conversely, is convicted of and executed for impiety and corrupting the city’s youth  — flourishes more than any other person. (Conversely, the tyrant, who is utterly in bondage to his appetites, is the unhappiest of men: he is afflicted by kakodaimonia.)

And the dialogue ends with the Myth of Er, which suggests that the cosmos itself inscribes reward for just men and punishment for wicked ones, especially for tyrants. The political questions which have occupied Socrates and his friends intermittently throughout the dialogue have disappeared, yielding to a sharpened version of the question with which we began: “What is justice?” has been rephrased as “What is flourishing?”

The title of this great dialogue should therefore be not Politeia but rather Eudaimonia.