Individual and Community in Greek Thought IV

Ευδαιμονια

1. Plato

Both war and religion are important themes in the Greek drama, and here the configurations of the individual and the communal have evidently have significant bearing on egoism and altruism. I would, however, like to defer the discussion of the drama till we have looked at a few examples from philosophical writing. It is necessary to limit our discussion severely here, for there is the real danger of being swamped by the material available. It may be argued that the respective realms of το ιδιον and το κοινον, the individual and the common, are most efficiently disposed in Greek philosophy, with the quest for happiness, ευδαιμονια [eudaimonia], being posited as the end of both personal and communal living. The idea needs, however, further elucidation, and I would like to discuss two sets of examples from Plato and Aristotle respectively. In the Republic (344 e) Socrates links the idea of justice, the foundation of social existence, with living happily. In response to Thrasymachus' blustering attempt to prove that forceful injustice is `stronger, freer and more masterful' than justice, Socrates says that the question needs to be understood in more general way: `Do you think it a small matter that you are attempting to determine and not the entire conduct of life that for each of us would make living most worthwhile?' Socrates' defence of justice begins with the attempt to constitute the state `from the beginning'. As justice is a personal attribute, it is that of the state too: but as the state is larger than the individual, the scope of justice is larger in the state than in the individual. The origin of the city is in the fact that individuals lack many things: dwelling together as mutual helpers and associates, through an interchange of giving and taking (369 e). The discovery of the origin of the city in this kind of necessity allows us to strike a perfect mean between self interest and communal interest.

Though the parallel between the just individual and the just state is continually reiterated, it seems correct to say that the Republic promotes specificity without individuality. The absolute needs of justice, understood as a hard division of acquired skills and natural propensities, does not leave any room for the emergence of individual identity. The process is viewed more as a fusing of individual capacities in the interests of the community: the guardians, the military elite, are imposed certain restraints like a ban on private belongings and wealth, frugality of life, restrictions on movement and communal residences. When this lack of a `private' dimension to their lives is commented upon - the appurtenances of fine living, sacrifices to the gods, convivial hospitality - Socrates argues that the happiness of the state rather than of any individual class is what matters here. It is not just that political life is seen as being as valuable for the philosopher as the contemplative life. If in both cases the sources of instability and disharmony - in the soul as much as in the state - need to be identified and eliminated, one line of approach is by radically altering the boundaries of self and other. In Book Five of the Republic, identifies family and private property as the principal causes for social conflict and proceeds to get rid of these problems by communalizing sexual relationships and child-rearing: instead of doing away with the notion of property, it is spread among all the members of the community. Martha Nussbaum observes this requires a transformation of life from the very beginning: `farmed out to interchangeable wet-nurses, prevented from forming special or intimate bonds with particular parental figures, and later with particular sex-partners, these citizens will treat all citizens as ... interchangeable exemplars of the same values' (FG 159). The best-ordered city is that, says Socrates, in which `the greatest number use the words `mine' and `not mine' of the same things in the same way'. The argument is repeated in the Laws: the first and best society is one with the best constitution and the best code of law, and in which all means have been taken to eliminate everything we mean by ownership from life; .... all possible means have been taken to make even what nature has made our own in some sense common property (739 c).

Because the realm of το ιδιον has thus been forcibly uprooted from the process of living, all actions one might say, are automatically altruistic: not because there is a definite ethical predisposition of this kind, but because of the way in which the orders of the private and the public have been reconstituted.  

Yet a certain uneasiness remains in the argument, and we may well feel that we have grasped the wrong end of the stick. Much as Plato admired the Spartan model, and drew upon features of the Spartan αγωγη in his own ideal of παιδεια [paideia], or education, the radical effort at social engineering that he outlines in Republic seems to have its roots in certain basic philosophical concerns which are repeatedly expressed in his discussions of wisdom and pleasure. The need for stability and the attempt to view the object of philosophical contemplation in its purest form lead to a notion of absolute value. The superiority of the philosopher's life is because the constituents of this life are the most stable and valuable: a truly rational standpoint would necessarily and in every case lead to the identification of the same objects of pleasure. At the same time because we are necessarily committed to modes of social life, the pursuit of philosophical goods, ευδαιμονια, is complicated and restrained by the instability of social life and the variability of the interests of the members of the community. The answer therefore is to imagine plurality in the form of unity, and postulate as much of the pleasures of philosophical contemplation to the community as possible. The comparison of the individual and the community in the Republic appears in this view not as an attempt to get rid of the private but to make the community operate as far as possible as an individual:

"That is the kind of state then, I presume, that, when anyone of the citizens suffers aught of good or evil, will be most likely to speak of the part that suffers as its own and will share the pleasure or pain as a whole." (462 d-e)