Was this translated properly?

[Anonymous No.17417365]

Is The Republic being mistranslated or did Plato really define justice as, for lack of a better term, "division of labor"? When I think of justice, I think of law, the legal system, morality, context. Also, his logic at coming to this conclusion is so piss poor that it boggles the mind. Am I missing something? Also, the book goes on strangle tangents that have nothing to do with justice, like the final part and the section about the cave, which seems to be more about "the forms". And what the fuck do the forms have to do with his political ideas, they seem totally unrelated. Do you think Plato was mixing up his own ideas with Socrates, which explains how schizo and unrelated everything is? Or is it all somehow ties together and related? I like some of his idea of course but his logic is 100% fucked and the work is scatterbrained.

[Anonymous No.17417388]

>>17417365
>Was this translated properly?
nothing can be. if you were ancient greek and were in the room with them, you would probably still misinterpret what they said due to words having different contexts based on region. translating those words into another is sure to kill off much of it.

[Anonymous No.17417423]

Yeah it’s a mess. But it’s 2400 years old so cut him some slack. Or just read it as satire.

[Anonymous No.17417429]

>>17417365
This is your mind on modernism and enlightenment platitudes. Justice is the division of labor, justice is neither good nor bad and is not an objective Truth. Different cultures right now as we live and breathe have wildly different concepts of what is Just and at the heart of this is always who gets what resources when and how, a division of labor in other words because resources must be extracted and exchanged accordingly in a manner which the vast majority of the population of a society deems fair in their minds.

Clear your head of all that gobbledygook and high horsed nonsense from subsequent works. This is why you’re supposed to start with the Greeks btw so you don’t get filtered by the propaganda and interpretations of later philosophers and you get the hard unadulterated reality of things as they are at their core

[Anonymous No.17417623]

>>17417429
I never said justice was objective. My take on this is that it seems like the work was searching to define justice using reason. My criticism of the book isn't that he can't have a unique interesting, non-objective, non-modernist or non-enlightenment influenced take on what justice is, it's that Plato's reasoning at coming to the determination that justice is "division of labor" was incredibly piss poor and scatterbrained and that perhaps this work was mistranslated because the reasoning is so absurd.

[Anonymous No.17417634]

>>17417623
Justice is the division of labor tho I’m not understanding what touted not getting here. I spelled it out for you in my earlier post. He’s not wrong.

[Anonymous No.17417637]

>>17417423
Satire of what?

[Anonymous No.17417641]

>>17417634
*you’re
Sorry I’m phone posting

[Anonymous No.17417647]

>>17417623
>it's that Plato's reasoning at coming to the determination that justice is "division of labor"
Plato doesn't even say anything in the book, this wasn't his definition, it was someone else's he was in the room with

[Anonymous No.17417690]

>>17417623
You know, the scholarly commentary on Plato dwarfs the man's actual work. Men more intelligent and better read than yourself have read the same works by Plato and written discourses on every single argument he ever made. You can read what other people think about this. You might even come to the realization that you missed something and there was a flaw in your reasoning. Please try to approach the classics with curiosity and humility, because more than 100 generations of men have read Plato and found great value in it, and you are probably bringing very little new to the table.

[Anonymous No.17417725]

>>17417637
Of Utopianism

[Anonymous No.17418462]

>>17417365
Justice is everything in its proper place. Justice applied to a polis means that every class of person is fulfilling their best-suited role. This is not like a division of labor in the Smithian sense -- a blacksmith would still make a variety of tools, for example. But Plato says that a person should focus exclusively on their own profession to be the very best at it, sort of as an extension of Athenian competitiveness.

Read Quandt's translation and commentary. It is available for free online and is unmatched in depth and clarity.

[Anonymous No.17418709]

Very funny when pseuds get filtered by Plato. All of the people that I've met who dismissed him turned out to be soft intellectually.

[Anonymous No.17419213]

>>17417634
You didn't spell anything out, just made a statement, similar to Plato. The only difference is that he used bad reasoning to come to his conclusions and you used no reasoning other than some fast statement about how justice is not good or bad and there is no objective truth and that it's "modernist" and "based on enlightenment platitudes" to think otherwise. Your reasoning is worse than Plato's, it's pure excrement.
>>17417647
He went through all that shit with the example of the hypothetical city in order to come to the conclusion that it was justice. Didn't you read the book?
>>17417690
> You can read what other people think about this.
That's literally the reason I made my post. Do you have anything to say about this topic?
> You might even come to the realization that you missed something and there was a flaw in your reasoning.
That's what I was assuming, which is why I created this thread and the questions I asked.
> Please try to approach the classics with curiosity and humility
I did, but I still have questions and if you don't have any answers you are just making some weird appeal to authority and evading providing your own responses.
> more than 100 generations of men have read Plato and found great value in it, and you are probably bringing very little new to the table.
So far you have provided no answers to any of my questions or issues with his works, you just point to the past and the sky and say "look at how well received this work is". You sound like a hardcore brainlet.

[Anonymous No.17419245]

>>17419213
What answers are you looking for exactly? What do you think justice is? You clearly are coming at this from an approach of a type of preconceived notion.

[Anonymous No.17419291]

>>17418709
You still have not provided any answers to my questions. Has it ever occurred to you that basically all the wisdom of these works were extracted by Socrates challenging people and asking questions and trying to come to an understanding about what they mean? That's literally EXACTLY what I am doing here and smoothbrains like you enter the picture and say "how dare you question this!", "you've been filtered!" or some other stupid shit.
I'm treating Plato with more respect than any of you cult-brains by viewing him as just a human making statements and trying to understand those statements by challenging aspects about them that don't seem to make any sense. So far the responses of Playdough-heads has been extremely unremarkable. Now you either have answers or you don't and if you don't, stfu and go to another thread because you are wasting my time.

[Anonymous No.17419321]

>>17419291
not that poster but I think the distinction here is that plato is talking about justice in a different sense to what we're used to.
to the greeks justice was a kind of "everything in its right place" thing, rather than the christian idea of justice as fairness in the moral sense. so for example, to plato, the slave being obedient to his master would be just. to a a modern man, the slave being freed from his servitude would be just.
someone a bit more knowledgeable on plato can correct me if i'm wrong.

[Anonymous No.17419337]

>>17417365
This is a 1 IQ post. It's fine that you may raise criticisms at how Plato defines Justice, but it seems to me that you have failed to understand the point of the Republic at all. Plato's conception to the world of the Forms, the Form of the Good are integril to understanding the Republic at all.

[Anonymous No.17419366]

>>17417725
How can the first comprensive philosophical utopia be an ironic deconstruction of utopia? Sure Plato is tongue in cheek at times but he's being genuine about his beliefs and his ideas for the best society.

[Anonymous No.17419390]

>>17419245
His reasoning, using the city as a method of coming to the determination that division of labor is justice, was about as piss poor as anything I have ever heard. It's laughable, like some stoned bimbo wrote it. Now, I can completely agree that division of labor is of extreme importance when it comes to efficiency in a society but to say this IS justice is fucking laughable. Did you even read his reasoning? Anyone who reads this seriously will view it as the most smoothbrained rationalization ever committed to paper. He brings up four random categories that the guardians should be educated in: wisdom, courage, justice and temperance, then suggests to look for these in the hypothetical city. In book IV he "finds" courage, wisdom and temperance in various random places and then just concludes that all that's left is division of labor...It's literally just retarded reasoning on basically every level. It's so retarded I almost wonder if the absurdity of this nonsense may have inspired Aristotle to dickslap all this ridiculousness with his system of logic. The only way I can get past this is to just ignore the "definitions" game he is playing here and all this bad reasoning and just view the work as being about his opinions about a positive form of being and how it is found in both man and the city as a larger form. His ideas are interesting but his reasoning is dog shit.

[Anonymous No.17419411]

If you want answers do your reading properly. Your takes are so narrow-minded that I can't take them seriously. I guess that you are shitposting or either is your first glance ever at any of Plato's. You shouldn't start with the Republic. In Plato there is everything, and I'm not kidding anon, there is so much thought to be done by reading Plato. I wouldn't obsess over the traditional lectures that are given to Plato. Don't start recognizing things superficially. If you read the myth of the cave and think to yourself, okay, here he is talking about the forms you are missing out the bigger picture.
Also, don't take this comment as if I had the true interpretation of Plato's works. Just put the effort in it, and you'll be rewarded. It helped to me a lot to think about the things said from the outside, and trying to give them different perspectives.
Finally I would drop the Republic if it's your first Plato. Get Apoogy as a start, The Banquet maybe to warm up and them something like Gorgias.
Good luck anon, wish you the best.

[Anonymous No.17419415]

>>17419321
>Christian idea of justice as fairness and not everything in its place
Wrong dude Christians are neo platanists this sort of humanist approach is a 19th and 20th century invention.

[Anonymous No.17419450]

>>17419390
How do you not get it anon? You keep saying it’s so bad but it makes perfect sense. And you didn’t answer my question what *is* justice?

[Anonymous No.17419497]

>>17419337
> it seems to me that you have failed to understand the point of the Republic at all.
I wasn't exactly criticizing the entire work or the notion of "the forms", if you go back and read my original post, I said I agree with many of his ideas and think the book is interesting, I was specifically criticizing the reasoning he uses when he comes to his conclusions about what Justice is, using the analogy of the city, which he spends half the book preparing towards this end. In the beginning of the book it seems that this is what the book will be about "what is justice", therefore I think it's important to criticize this specific aspect of this work. He spends 1/2 the book building up to this laughably idiotic reasoning. Yes. I think it's worth criticizing that specific aspect of the book.
> Plato's conception to the world of the Forms, the Form of the Good are integril to understanding the Republic at all.
I read Plato's other works over 20 years ago and never read this, so I recently decided to go back and read it. I'm not sure if you were even born 20 years ago but FYI, I'm well aware of his ideas about the forms and I find them very interesting. My criticism was about the reasoning Plato uses to define justice as well as the scatterbrained nature of the book which seems all over the place. It is an interesting book with some good ideas but the reasoning is so terrible in many places that it was shocking.

[Anonymous No.17419523]

>>17419497
Can you describe the specific argument you have with what is wrong with his reasoning besides saying they are idiotic or stupid. Like spell it out for me exactly why they’re wrong.

[Anonymous No.17419526]

>>17419390
>>using the city as a method of coming to the determination that division of labor is justice

You keep saying this but this is not the definition that Plato gives. Your continued use of this phrase shows that you do not understand him. He says that the definition of justice will be found in the ideal city. The concept of "finding justice" has a deeper meaning than you are attributing to it. He means finding true justice as it is being acted out in the world by basically enlightened people. Later in The Republic he introduces the concept of Philosopher Kings or Guardians. What makes Guardians special is that they have been taught the dialectic and their minds can enter into the intellectual realm of the Forms. The Forms are thought objects of objective truth. Inside of their minds they will interact with the Form of the Good. To use an abstract metaphor, the Form of the Good is the ultimate form and sort of a running stream of Goodness/Correctness/Truth that runs through all other "lesser" forms and bolsters them. So the Guardians, through their dialectical knowledge of the Form of the Good, will come to know the true meaning of Justice and other lesser objective knowledge. The Form of the Good will cause them to become agents of Goodness in the world. If you acutally want to understand Plato you must actually fucking read The Republic and know what his concept of the Forms are. Now that we have enlighted Guardians they will govern The Republic properly. Bla bla bla.

>>He brings up four random categories that the guardians should be educated in: wisdom, courage, justice and temperance, then suggests to look for these in the hypothetical city.

>>It's so retarded I almost wonder if the absurdity of this nonsense may have inspired Aristotle to dickslap all this ridiculousness with his system of logic.
I really doubt you have any sophisticated understanding of Aristotle if you literally got filtered by Plato.

[Anonymous No.17419716]

>>17419450
> What do you think justice is?
I was not making any claims about Justice and what I think is 100% a red herring and irrelevant but if you must know, I would say it's extremely complex. The form of Justice is a framework we put over nature, a set of rules we decide backed by military force. The rules can be whatever we want, but generally speaking they tend to be designed to protect private property, including the body.
> You keep saying it’s so bad but it makes perfect sense.
He just comes up with four totally and completely random categories of what would make a great guardian, then looks for three of these aspects in his hypothetical city, locates them in the most laughable and absurd way and then by false reduction assumes that the fourth category, Justice, must be found in whatever remains, which he views as division of labor. Absolutely none of that makes any sense whatsoever.

[Anonymous No.17419751]

>>17418709
>anecdotal evidence
pseud cope

[Anonymous No.17419792]

>>17419526
>the Guardians, through their dialectical knowledge of the Form of the Good, will come to know the true meaning of Justice and other lesser objective knowledge
If he actually wrote this I would actually say that makes a lot of sense, but I didn't read this anywhere in The Republic. Can you provide any quotes?
> I really doubt you have any sophisticated understanding of Aristotle if you literally got filtered by Plato.
Can I ask you why you feel the need to insult people like some faggy edgelord online? I'm just asking questions about The Republic, I don't care about you or how your faggot brain feels about me. I don't care about how "filtered" you think I am you epic retard, I've read every great philosopher in history all the way up to Heidegger, I'm not "filtered" you idiot, I'm just asking questions. That's how you learn you fucking moron. You learn by challenging and asking hard questions. I've probably been reading philosopher longer than you have been alive. Fuck off and stick your gay filter up your ass.

[Anonymous No.17420160]

>>17419523
I have done this already several times in this thread. In Book III, he says that there are four attributes to a good guardian: 1. wisdom, 2. courage, 3. temperance and 4. justice. He then looks to his city to find where these are located, claims to find the first three and then just sort of says that you can find justice in whatever is left over, which he implies is division of labor. Every single chain in this string of reasoning makes no sense. Read book III and book IV again. Either it's being mistranslated or his reasoning is excrement.

[Anonymous No.17420188]

>>17419321
Not specifically about Plato but about ancient Greek moral debates: obviously dikaiosyne doesn't perfectly translate as justice, but there really is probably no better term. In the thinnest specification of it, dikaiosyne was traditionally thought to involve getting people what they're due, respecting their rights, obeying legitimate authority and lawfulness, the common good, etc.. If to the ancient Greeks obedience to a slavemaster is just, this isn't because they think justice means something different, but because they view slavery as legitimate when we don't.

[Anonymous No.17420588]

>>17419792
>why are you insulting me?
>barrage of vulgar insults

[Anonymous No.17420792]

>>17420588
There is literally nothing wrong with insulting people who randomly insult you. You didn't "catch me in a contradiction" like you think you have. And I don't want to avoid these kinds of stupid arguments because it hurts my feelings, it's because it's a distraction from the actual topic. If you have nothing to say about the topic you are wasting peoples time.

[Anonymous No.17420874]

>>17420792
Yeah I guess that makes sense. I apologize.

[Anonymous No.17420891]

>>17417637
just the way the strawmen constantly agree with Socrates is risible

[Anonymous No.17421307]

hey guys i am dumb and currently reading the republic, and >>17419390 is kind of my thoughts on it? I feel like I am getting filtered super hard was I supposed to read something before starting with the republic

[Anonymous No.17422116]

hey guys i have an IQ of 265 and currently reading the republic, and >>17419390 is kind of my thoughts on it! I feel like plato's arguments for why justice is division of labor is pure excrement and the people who think this is some groundbreaking shit must have collective brain damage from sucking Plato's dick for over two thousand years.

[Anonymous No.17423768]

>>17417429
>modernism and enlightenment platitudes
Thanks I'll take it over objectivist absolutist obscurantist tomfoolery