I claim that the Republic is a protreptic discourse, as defined by Slings

Robert GALLAGHER Plato’s Republic as a protreptic discourse

Representations of character and of pathos exceed the requirements of relating an abstract philosophical discourse. So, we are obliged to explain why Plato represents states of character and pathê in the fictive image of Glaucon in the Republic. One explanation is that Plato represents these as part of his design of Republic as a protreptic discourse, in the sense that within the text one character (Socrates) endeavors to cause a change in the behavior of another character (Glaucon). So, the Republic, I claim, (1) represents Glaucon, Socrates’ principal interlocutor, to be in a state of conflict between his belief in justice and his desires for luxury, honor and sex; and (2) represents Socrates to be developing arguments that arouse Glaucon’s emotions in such a way that he resolves his conflict in favor of justice and the pursuit of philosophy.

These claims are consistent with Plato’s treatment of emotion and belief in the Republic. For he writes that people abandon true opinions because of suffering, grief, or fear (413). An example is the oligarchic youth (553). Socrates proposes education in lyric poetry and physical training to habituate the emotions of the spirit so that those pathē do not undermine the beliefs of the guardians (cf. 411-13, 401-2, 441e, 522a).

Plato also represents Glaucon as in need of protreptic. Glaucon exhibits states of character which constitute motivations for the argument he advances for injustice. Glaucon is subject to desires for luxury (372), sex (474d), and honor (548d). Glaucon emphasizes that the unjust obtain the objects of these very same desires (cf. 362b). Though Glaucon says the argument for injustice is not his, his states of character show that he desires the objects of the life it advocates. But because Glaucon shares Socrates’ belief in justice, he is in a state of aporia or conflict (cf. 358c7); he faces a ‘choice of life’ between injustice and justice (360e, 545a). Socrates must convince Glaucon that if he arranges his life to satisfy his desires, he will be wretched.

Socrates’ protreptic arouses Glaucon’s thumos as an ally to his reason to overpower his base desires (cf. Rep. 440ef), so that Glaucon resolves his conflict in favor of justice and undergoes a periagogē towards philosophy. To show this, I discuss the discourses on the Cave, mathematics, and the youth with defective souls.

Glaucon’s recognition that the just are happier than the unjust (580b) reflects modification of his dispositions. The attachment of his passions to the ‘goods’ he discusses in Rep. 2 prevented him from recognizing that the just are happier. But in rejecting the four inferior states of soul, Glaucon rejects ‘the good’ which each seeks, and then makes a free choice for justice. So, not only does Socrates endeavor to cause a change in Glaucon, but he is also represented as succeeding, insofar as Glaucon abandons the argument for injustice.