Greed and idolatry, cont.

One of the things I noticed when I did a corpus search for pleonexia (πλεονεξία, "greed") was the great frequency with which it appeared in Plato. I didn't really want to get into that, because I honestly hate reading Plato in English and reading him in Greek is much worse.^[1]

Then I realized that if there's a word relating to morality that appears frequently in Plato, there will be one million articles about it. And there sure were! Here are a handful of the interesting things a cursory skim of the JSTOR results had to say about πλεονεξία in a Platonic context:

• Thomas W. Smith, in a fairly recent article, defines pleonexia in the Platonic context as "a clinging possessiveness arising in the spirited part of the soul that issues in projects of power and self protection".^[2] Smith also says that "the way pleonexia is rooted in the way thumos [soul] tends to overreact to the evanescence and vulnerability of the goods we call 'our own'".^[3] (There is, it must be noted, a light pun lurking here, one that Socrates makes use of in the Lysis, in that the Greek word οἰκεῖος can mean both "one's own" and "like one's self". The boundaries between possession and identity are thus elided. For discussion, see Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, 33–34.)
• Smith also helpfully cites Alasdair MacIntyre's Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, which has a fascinating section on pleonexia. MacIntyre argues hard for translating it as "acquisitiveness" rather than "greed",^[4] and that even that doesn't fully capture the sense of it.
• Apparently in Plato's Republic 373e, Socrates blames pleonexia for war in general.^[5]
• I loved the discussion of pleonexia in The Perils of Uglytown, 23–25. Berger seems to concur with my idea about pleonexia having an outward-facing element to it: as he put it, it "...involves wanting to take from another before another takes from you".^[6] He also says that "...pleonexia is represented as the desire to escape from the local constraints of the body and from its extensions in political society."^[7]
• Particularly relevant to Victoria's interests, I found a book chapter talking about Plato in the context of René Girard's mimetic theory, arguing that "Plato understood the dynamics of acquisitive mimesis (pleonexia) quite well, and the entire Republic is a sustained inquiry into its pathologies."^[8]

Works cited

Belangia, Sherwood. “Plato.” In René Girard and the Western Philosophical Tradition, Volume 1: Philosophy, Violence, and Mimesis, edited by Andreas Wilmes and George A. Dunn, 1–27. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2024. https://doi.org/10.14321/jj.14416295.5.

Berger, Harry. The Perils of Uglytown: Studies in Structural Misanthropology from Plato to Rembrandt. New York City: Fordham University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt15m7nkq.5.

Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Frank, Jill. "Wages of War: On Judgment in Plato's 'Republic.'" Political Theory 35, no. 4 (2007): 443–67. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20452570.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989.

Smith, Thomas W. "Love of the Good as the Cure for Spiritedness in Plato's 'Republic'". The Review of Metaphysics 70, no. 1 (2016): 33–58. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44806894.