Abstract

Why did Plato conceive of the ideal community as a friendship? To answer this question, my dissertation begins by locating Plato's view of the role of friendship in politics within the context of contemporary Athenian ideological uses of the notion of friendship. With this background, it presents an interpretation of civic friendship in the Republic as an objectively specifiable relationship of mutual benefit and recognition. Against the view that Plato introduces the idea of friendship to provide virtuous people with a motivation for acting altruistically, I argue that friendship, like other rational pursuits, must bring about the agent's own benefit. Plato uses the idea that rational people will desire beneficial friendships to motivate their self-improvement in virtue and wisdom. Thus wisdom, the knowledge of how to benefit others, be benefited oneself, and recognize it--rather than altruism--is the basis of friendship. However, because Plato claims a city-wide friendship for his ideal community, it is necessary to examine how people who are not wise can participate in civic friendship: how they can be benefited, so as to justify the city's claim to be a friendship, and how they can recognize these benefits, so as to be motivated to cooperate in the city's arrangements. The dissertation shows how one group of people who lack wisdom, the auxiliaries in the ideal city, can be truly benefited and recognize their benefit as such, and discusses tensions in Plato's account of recognized benefit to another group, the producers.