![]() ![]() He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result-when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared. Now the shepherds met together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report about the flocks to the king into their assembly he came having the ring on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer present. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended. ![]() “According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Glaucon references the mythical precedent of Gyges, “the ancestor of Croesus the Lydian,” who was granted the power of the ring by chance: Thanks to this thought experiment, “we shall discover in the very act the just and unjust man to be proceeding along the same road, following their interest, which all natures deem to be their good, and are only diverted into the path of justice by the force of law.” We shall discover what both the “just” and the “unjust” man are really like, and what they really share in common, if we expose the deepest recesses of human nature by the thought experiment of granting any man, just or unjust, the ring of power.Ĭomplete liberty is what possession of the ring is imagined to grant in the thought experiment. In other words, a thought experiment to expose the truth about human desire and human nature is proposed. ![]() For those who doubt the truth of this thesis, Glaucon says the truth “will best appear if we imagine something of this kind: having given both to the just and the unjust power to do what they will, let us watch and see whither desire will lead them.” If people have the ability to use power, we observe, they tend to abuse it. Glaucon opines that “those who practise justice do so involuntarily and because they have not the power to be unjust,” because of the witness of experience. Given the conflicting messages of our social lives, how is a human being to live life truly with respect to justice and to attain happiness? It matches a common human experience of growing up in a human community and learning how society establishes rules, and expects you to play by them, yet also furnishes plenty of examples of citizens who are, so to speak, gaming the system. This account of “the nature and origin of justice” has an immediate intuitive appeal. For no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist he would be mad if he did.” (Plato, Republic, trans. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice -it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil, and honoured by reason of the inability of men to do injustice. And so when men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither hence there arise laws and mutual covenants and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. “They say that to do injustice is, by nature, good to suffer injustice, evil but that the evil is greater than the good. In the common conception of justice, justice is a necessary evil that imposes restrictions on individuals, and individuals accept these restrictions only in order to avoid even worse restrictions. But what is the meaning of this tale in the original form in which the Republic presents it to us? This famous tale has been adapted in equally famous ways: one need only think of The Lord of the Rings, or Wagner’s Ring Cycle, to realize its perennial influence. In Plato’s Republic, we hear of the tale of Gyges’ ring. ![]()
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