Plato and the Pursuit of Justice

“Those who do not make justice the central concern for Plato are not talking about Plato at all.”

Justice (dikaiosynē) is the central concern of Plato in his dialogues—as is friendship. It is not difficult to imagine why. Socrates, Plato’s teacher (and friend), was unjustly put to death by the state of Athens. This was something Plato never forgave or forgot; however, it did spur him to question the nature of justice, which is what began the entire tradition of Western philosophy.

Plato is sometimes remembered as a metaphysician and epistemologist, a philosopher who considered how the universe came to be and how we can know anything in this life. Plato’s many afterlives are just as interesting as his actual life, but they obscure some important realities about Plato’s mission while he was living. Later Neoplatonists, Plotinus being the most famous, reinvented Plato as a mystic (claiming they possessed secret lost dialogues). Not long after the Neoplatonic remaking of Plato, a new religion from Judaea spread into the Greek world. Several centuries after taking hold, Christian theologians, in their cultural struggles with academic skepticism and the remnants of Roman paganism, enlisted Plato into their ranks. Plato was pursuing truth, and, while not a Christian, he shared many Christian values and virtues. (Justin Martyr and Saint Augustine are among the most famous to have presented a Christianized version of Plato, and he would receive yet another Christian makeover during the Renaissance.)

While the Neoplatonic and Christian versions of Plato have some truth to them (Plato does have metaphysical-mystical and epistemological implications), the fact is Plato was a philosopher of justice first and foremost. In fact, if the history of Western philosophy is, as Alfred North Whitehead put it, “a series of footnotes to Plato,” we can extrapolate further that Western philosophy begins (and ends) with the question of justice. What is justice? is the principal question of all philosophy as begun by Plato.