Plato on Grief as a Mental Disorder

Abstract

Abstract:This paper considers two competing interpretations of Socrates’ discussions of the appropriateness of grief in Plato’s Republic. The commonly accepted ‘Stoic Reading’ maintains that Plato thinks grief can and should be eliminated by the fully virtuous individual. I offer a textual case for the ‘Conflict Reading’, according to which grief is ineliminable, and sometimes appropriate. I focus primarily on three passages: the justification for censoring depictions of grief in Book III (387d–388a), the shared grieving of the collective family in Book V (462a–463e), and the Book X passage about the decent person’s measured grief (603e–604d). I show that these passages offer not only evidence that grief cannotbe eliminated, but also hint at an underlying account of why it resists elimination.