republic
...’s virtue. Courage lies with the auxiliaries. It is only their courage that counts as a virtue of the city because they are the ones who must fight for the city. A courageous farmer, or even ruler, would do the city no good. Moderation and justice, in contrast to wisdom and courage, are spread out over the whole city. Moderation is identified with the agreement over who should rule the city, and justice, finally, is its complement—the principle of specialization, the law that all do the job to which they are best suited. So now we have reached one of our two aims, at least partially. We have identified justice on a city-wide level. Our next task is to see if there is an analogous virtue in the case of the individual. Analysis: Book IV, 419a-434c Socrates has at last provided a definition of justice. This definition bears strong resemblance to the two definitions of justice put forward in Book I. Cephalus ventured that justice was the honoring of lega l obligations, while his son Polemarchus suggested that justice amounts to helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies. These two definitions are linked by the imperative of rendering what is due, or giving to each what is appropriate. This same imperative finds variant expression in Plato’s definition of justice—justice as a political arrangement in which each person plays the appropriate role. What is due to ea ch person is rendered all at once. Each is assigned the role in society that best suits their nature and that best serves society as a whole. In one sense, Polemarchus and Cephalus were not that far off the mark. However, in following the traditional notions, they were thinking about justice as a set of actions, rather than as a structure to society, a phenomenon that spreads out over a city as a whole. In addition to the definition of justice, we also get the definitions of four other virtues in this section. The city’s courage, Socrates tells us, is located in the auxiliaries, because it is only their coura ge that will effect the city as a whole. Yet right after making this claim, he goes on to tell us that what the auxiliaries possess is not simply courage but something he calls “civic courage.” Many scholars have interpreted civic courage as a kind of second-rate courage. What the auxiliaries have, Socrates tells us, is the right beliefs about what is to be feared and what is not to be feared. Their courage is founded upon belief, rather than knowledge. Later in the book, he indicates that real virtue must be founded upon knowledge, suggesting that virtue based on habit or belief and not knowledge will fail when the going gets very tough. Since only the guardians possess knowledge, only the guardians can be truly virtuous or courageous. Summary: Book IV, 435d-end Now that Socrates has identified societal justice, he turns to look for individual justice. Justice in the individual, as in the city, involves the correct power relationship among parts, with each part occupying its appropriate role. In the individual, the “parts” are not classes of society; instead, they are aspects of the soul—or sources of desire. In order to make the case that individual justice parallels political justice, Socrates must claim that there are precisely three parts of the soul. By cataloging the various human desires, he identifies a -rational part of the soul that lusts after truth, a spirited part of the soul that lusts after honor, and an appetitive part of the soul that lusts after everything else, including food, drink, sex, and especially money. These three part s of the soul correspond to the three classes in the just city. The appetite, or money-loving part, is the aspect of the soul most prominent among the producing class; the spirit or honor-loving part is most prominent among the auxiliaries; and reason, or the knowledge-loving part, is dominant in the guardians. Just relations between the three parts of the soul mirror just relations among the classes of society. In a just person the rational part of the soul rules the other parts, with the spirited part acting as helper to keep the appetitive in line. Comp are this to the city where the truth-loving guardians rule, with the honor-loving auxiliaries acting as their helpers to keep the money-loving producers in line. What it means for one part of the soul to “rule” the others is for the e ntire soul to pursue the desires of that part. In a soul ruled by spirit, for instance, the entire soul aims at achieving honor. In a soul ruled by appetite, the entire soul aims at fulfilling these appetites, whether these be for food, drink, sex, fine material goods, or hordes of wealth. In a just soul, the soul is geared entirely toward fulfilling whatever knowledge-loving desires reason produces. Socrates has now completely fulfilled his first goal: he has identified justice on both the political and individual levels. Yet in giving an account of justice, he has deviated from our intuitive notions of what this virtue is. We tend to think of justi ce as a set of actions, yet Socrates claims that justice is really a result of the structure of the soul. After identifying individual justice, he demonstrates that a person who’s soul is in the right arrangement will behave according to the intuitive norms of justice. He needs to show that the notion of justice we have just a rrived at is not counter to our intuitions—that this notion accounts for our intuitions and explains them. Socrates points out that since our just person is ruled by a love of truth, he will not be in the grips of lust, greed, or desire for honor. Because of this, Socrates claims, we can rest assured that he will never steal, betray friends or his city, commit adultery, disrespect his parents, violate an oath or agreement, neglect the gods, or commit any other acts commonly considered unjust. His strong love of truth weakens urges that might lead to vice. Socrates concludes Book IV by asserting that justice amounts to the health of the soul: a just soul is a soul with its parts arranged appropriately, and is thus a healthy soul. An unjust soul, by contrast, is an unhealthy soul. Given this fact, we are no w in a position to at least suspect that it pays to be just. After all, we already admitted that health is something desirable in itself, so if justice is the health of the soul then it too should be desirable. Plato feels that he is not ready just yet to make the argument in favor of justice’s worth. He puts off the definitive proofs until Book IX. Analysis: Book IV, 435d-end The word justice is applied by Plato to both societies and individuals, and Plato’s overall strategy in the Republic is to first explicate the primary notion of political justice, then to derive an analogous concept of individual justice. Plato defines political justice as being inherently structural. A society consists of three main classes of people—the producers, the auxiliaries, and the guardians. The just society consists in the right and fixed relationships between these three classes. Each of these groups must do the appropriate job, and only that job, and each must be in the right position of power and influence in relation to the other. In this section, Plato sets out to show that the three classes of society have analogs in the soul of every individual. In other words, the soul, like the city, is a tripartite entity. The just individual can be defined in analogy with the just society ; the three parts of his soul are fixed in the requisite relationships of power and influence. In order to make this claim work, Plato must prove that there really are three parts of the soul. There are two distinct legs of the argument for the tripartite soul, and the relationship between them is obscure. The first leg attempts to establish the presence of three distinct sets of desire in every individual. The second leg argues that these three sets of desire correspond to three distinct sources of desire, three distinct parts of the soul. The ultimate conclusion is that every individual has a tripartite soul. Plato has to classify the desires, because setting out to prove that there are three distinct parts of the soul without first establishing that there are these three types of desire, would not be as stylistically effective or compel ling. The first leg bridges the transition from the societal to the individual level by showing that group properties stem from individual properties. Wh y is it important for Plato to demonstrate that the three types of desire present in every individual correspond to three independent sources of desire? Why would it not be sufficient to maintain that these three forces are manifested at different times by the same subject, but do not correspond to three distinct p arts of the soul? This distinction allows the three types of desire to be exerted simultaneously. Political justice is a structural property, consisting in the relationships of three necessary parts. The relationships -constituting political harmony are fi xed and static in the same sense as the mathematical ratios that constitute musical harmony. In the individual, though desires come and go, the relationship between the different sets of desires remains fixed. The three-part division of the soul is crucial to Plato’s overall project of offering the same sort of explication of justice whether applied to societies or individuals. Plato begins his argument for the tripartite soul by setting up a criterion for individuation. The same thing cannot be affected in two opposite ways at the same time (436C). As pairs of opposites, he includes “assent and dissent, wanting to have something and rejecting it, taking something and pushing it away” (437B). Plato argues for the truth of this claim by bringing analogies from the behavior of bodies—a method which may seem illegitimate, given that he wants to use the principle to apply to aspects of the soul (in particular, opposing desires), not to physical objects. In order to make the leap from observations about forces and desires to conclusions about parts of the soul, Plato relies throughout the argument on a suppressed metaphysical claim. Where there is desire, there is the agent of desire: the thing which desires. Using this premise and the criterion for individuation, he will arrive at three distinct parts of the soul, corresponding to the three aspects he has identified within the city. Plato first tries to establish the existence of a purely appetitive part of the soul using this method. Thirst is a desire. There is a subject of this desire. Thirst is a desire for unqualified drink—that is, no particular kind o f drink, just drink (437E). Now comes a logical digression, the aim of which is to preclude the combination of appetitive and rational forces in the same subject. The outcome of the logical digression is that if the truth about A is relative to the truth about B, then if B is qualified in a certain way, A must be analogously qualified (438A-E). Therefore, the agent of thirst desires drink unqualified (439B). Because the agent desires unqualified drink rather than good drink, healthful drink, etc., it cannot be argued that this subject is a combination of appetitive and rational forces. The subject corresponding to thirst is characterized by pure animal urge, with no rational discrimination. If, on the other hand, the desire for drink were theoretically inextricable from the desire for good or healthy drink, there would be no pure appetite, and correspondingly no purely appetitive s ubject. The desire for drink is representative of a whole class of desires which stem from the same agent. Other appetitive desires include hunger and lust for sex. The subject which desires unqualified food, drink, and sex is the appetitive part (437C). Plato feels no need to establish that the same agent is responsible for these various, though obviously related, desires. No reason is demanded for the identification of agents of desire, only for thei r separation. Plato next attempts to isolate the rational part of the soul. He says that if there is a desire which opposes the appetitive desire, there is another, separate agent of desire. He then makes the empirical claim that there are sometimes thirs ty people who do not wish to drink (439c). Therefore, there is an agent which desires to drink, and another agent which desires not to drink. Plato then makes another empirical claim—that desires opposing the appetites always come from rational thought (439D). He concludes that the second agent’s desires come from rational thought. He now believes himself to have identified a purely appetitive and a purely rational subject. Plato is not justified in asserting that reason always opposes appetite. It is fairly easy to conceive of a situation in which spirit, rather than reason, would oppose appetite. Plato does not need to make as strong a claim that only reason opposes appetite. Instead, he could give an example of an anti-appetiti ve desire which does, in fact, happen to come from reason—for instance, not wanting the drink because it is unhealthy. He could then conclude that there is an agent other than appetite and that this agent’s desires come from rational thought. Adding the extra claim that all desires which oppose appetitive desires stem from reason, is unnecessary, false, and inconsistent with a later step in this argument which shows spirit opposing the appetite. It would be more problematic if one could imagine a situation in which two appetites are opposed to one another. Plato would respond, however, that it is reason which tells us that two conflicting appetitive desires are mutually exclusive, forcing us to view them as opposing desires. Having argued for the existence of two different parts of the soul—one appetitive and the other rational—Plato needs only to establish that there is a third, spirited part of the soul in order to complete the analogy with the city. Once again, he begins this project by establishing the existence of a third branch of desire, as well as an agent of that desire. Anger and indignation are desires. There is an agent of these desires. Next, he tries to prove that this third agent does not reduce to either of the two already established. He first shows that spirit is not appetite. A man can feel angry at his appetites (440a). The third agent is not the same as the appetitive part. In contrast with the other potential identifications—i.e. reason with appetite, spir it with appetite—the only possible identification Plato contemplates between spirit and reason places spirit in the position of reason’s henchman, carrying out the desires reason dictates. Plato, therefore, does not use the regular criterion of individ uation to distinguish spirit from reason. Instead, he attempts to show that spirit cannot amount to the henchman of reason because it sometimes acts in reason’s absence. Children and animals have the desires of the third agent without having the reasoning part of the soul (441B). Therefore, the third agent is not the rational part of the soul. Plato concludes that there are three separate parts of the soul: appetite, spirit, and reason. In what way are these three distinct parts, and in what way do they make up a unified whole? Plato’s argument for a tripartite soul in Book IV, as well as his description of the three parts of the soul in Book IX, depend primarily on identification of the soul and its parts through the desires exerted. Desires are active principles, forces that motivate the passive body. The soul, then, at least here, can be seen as a metaphysical entity which serves as the seat of human activity. The soul is the collection of active pri nciples in a human being. According to Plato, there are three main “psychological” forces at work in an individual—the force which has as its object physical entities and money; the force which has as its object nonmaterial but worldly entities such as honor and victory; and the force whi ch has as its object the insensible realm of the Forms. These three forces are expressed in desires which correspond to appetite, spirit, and reason. All three of these forces make up one entity—the soul—in that they compri se the collective group of active principles in an individual. Yet they are distinct active principles which operate in different ways and have very different objects. Because the soul is the seat of human forces, it is clear why Plato thought it appropriate to individuate its parts by demonstrating opposing desires within it. The best way to prove that there are independently working active forces within the soul is to demonstrate these forces exerting themselves in opposition to one another. Clearly the same active force cannot be respo nsible for the exertion of two opposing forces. Revealing opposing desires amounts to revealing discrete active forces within the collective seat of activity. Plato uses this criterion of individuation to demonstrate that there are three active forces within the soul. While he does succeed in isolating three types of desire, he does nothing to prove that there are no more than three active forces. Perhaps rather than a tripartite soul, there is really a quadpartite or quinpartite soul. What evidence does Plato have to restrict it to three? Plato’s tripartite analysis of the soul puts forth at least three quite substantive claims. First, there are psychological agents of desire that possess the forces that act upon the body. Second, the multitudes of desires that an individual pos sesses can be reduced to three main categories, corresponding to three such psychological agents of desire that control human behavior. Third, the fundamental description of human psychology—that of the “structure of the soul”—has ethical implications and is necessary to an understanding of justice. While the first and third claims have little currency among modern thinkers, the tripartite division of the individual psyche or soul has remained a viable hypoth esis in accounting for internal psychological conflicts in the modern era. It survives, in modified forms, in such modern reincarnations as Freud’s tripartite division between the id, the ego, and the superego. Summary: Book V, 449a-472a Having identified the just city and the just soul, Socrates now wants to identify four other constitutions of city and soul, all of which are vicious to varying degrees. But before he can get anywhere in this project, Polemarchus and Adeimantus interrupt him. They would like him to return to the statement he made in passing about sharing spouses and children in common. Socrates launches into a lengthy discussion about the lifestyle of the guardians. In the first of several radical claims that he makes in this section Socrates declares that females will be reared and trained alongside males, receiving the same education and taking on the same political roles. Though he acknowledges that in many respects men and women have different natures, he believes that in the relevant respect—the division among appetitive, spirited, and rational people—women fall along the same natural lines as men. Some are naturally appetitive, some naturally spirited, and some naturally rational. The ideal city will treat and make use of them as such. Socrates then discusses the requirement that all spouses and children be held in common. For guardians, sexual intercourse will only take place during certain fixed times of year, designated as festivals. Males and females will be made husband and wife at these festivals for roughly the duration of sexual intercourse. The pairings will be determined by lot. Some of these people, those who are most admirable and thus whom we most wish to reproduce, might have up to four or five spouses in a single one of these festivals. All the children produced by these mating festivals will be taken from their parents and reared together, so that no one knows which children descend from which adults. At no other time in the year is sex permitted. If guardians have sex at an undesignated time and a child results, the understanding is that this child must be killed. To avoid rampant unintentional incest, guardians must consider every child born between seven and ten months after their copulation as their own. These children, in turn, must consider that same group of adults as their parents, and each other as brothers and sisters. Sexual relations between these groups is forbidden. Socrates explains that these rules of procreation are the only way to ensure a unified city. In most cities the citizens’ loyalty is divided. They care about the good of the whole, but they care even more about their own family. In the just city, everyone is considered as family and treated as such. There are no divided loyalties. As Socrates puts it, everyone in the city says “mine” about the same things. The city is unified because it shares all its aims and concerns. The final question to be asked is whether this is a plausible requirement—whether anyone can be asked to adhere to this lifestyle, with no family ties, no wealth, and no romantic interludes. But before answering this question, Socrates deals with a few other issues pertaining to the guardians’ lifestyle, all of them relating to war. He states that children training to become guardians should be taken to war so they can watch and learn the art as any young apprentice does. He recommends that they be put on horseback so that they can escape in the case of defeat. He also explains that anyone who behaves cowardly in war will be stripped of their role as a guardian. He ends by discussing the appropriate manner in which to deal with defeated enemies. When it comes to Greek enemies, he orders that the vanquished not be enslaved and that their lands not be destroyed in any permanent way. This is because all Greeks are really brothers, and eventually there will be peace between them again. When it comes to barbarian—i.e., non-Greek—enemies, anything goes. Analysis: Book V, 449a-472a Plato advocates the equal education of women in Book V, but it would be inaccurate to think that Plato believed in the modern notion of equality between the sexes. He states in this section that women are inferior to men in all ways, including intellect. He could not have thought that all women were inferior to all men, or else dividing women into the three classes would make no sense. Instead, he believed that within each class the women are inferior to the men. So, for instance, guardian women would be superior to men of the two other classes, but inferior to most men of their own class. With regard to the larger topic of family life, we might ask why common families are limited to the guardian class. Given that this arrangement is offered as a guarantee for patriotism, a preemptive strike against divided loyalties, why should it only apply to this class of society? The first thing to point out in relation to this topic is that the restrictions on family life are probably meant to apply to both the guardian and the auxiliary classes. These two classes are, after all, raised and educated together until adolescence when the rulers are chosen out as the best among the group, so chances are that their lifestyles are the same as well. Plato is often sloppy with the term “guardian,” using it to apply sometimes only to the rulers and other times to both rulers and warriors. It is likely that the restriction on personal wealth also applies to auxiliaries. The only class left out of this requirement is the producers. Since the producers have little to do with the political life of the city—they do not have to make any decisions pertaining to the city, or to fight on behalf of the city—their patriotism does not matter. Just as we saw that a courageous farmer does no good for the city as a whole, a patriotic craftsman or doctor is irrelevant from the standpoint of the society’s good. The producers’ only political task is to obey. Summary: Book V, 471e-end What about someone who believes in beautiful things but doesn’t believe in the beautiful itself? (See Important Quotations Explained) Socrates has procrastinated long enough and must explain how guardians could be compelled to live in this bizarre way. His response is the most radical claim yet. Our system is only possible, he says, if the rulers are philosophers. Thu s he introduces the concept of the philosopher-king, which dominates the rest of the Republic. To back up this shocking claim, Socrates must explain, of course, what he means by the term “philosopher.” Clearly he cannot mean to refer to the sort of people who are currently called “philosophers,” since these people do not seem fit to rule. The first step in introducing the true philosopher is to distinguish these special people from a brand of psuedo-intellectuals whom Socrates refers to as the “lovers of sights and sounds.” The lovers of sights and sounds are aesthetes, diletta ntes, people who claim expertise in the particular subject of beauty. In the distinction of the philosopher from the lover of sights and sounds the theory of Forms first enters the Republic. Plato does not explain through Socrates what the Forms are but assumes that his audience is familiar with the theory. Forms, we learn in other Platonic dialogues, are eternal, unchanging, universal absolute ideas, such as the Good, the Beautiful, and the Equal. Though Forms cannot be seen—but only grasped with the mind—they are responsible for making the things we sense around us into the sorts of things the y are. Anything red we see, for instance, is only red because it participates in the Form of the Red; anything square is only square because it participates in the Form of the Square; anything beautiful is only beautiful because it participates in the Form of Beauty, and so on. What makes philosophers different from lovers of sights and sounds is that they apprehend these Forms. The lovers of sights and sounds claim to know all about beautiful things but cannot claim to have any knowledge of the Form of the Beautiful—nor do they even recognize that there is such a thing. Because the lovers of sights and sounds do not deal with Forms, Socrates claims, but only with sensible particulars—that is, the particular things we sense around us—they ca n have opinions but never knowledge. Only philosophers can have knowledge, the objects of which are the Forms. In order to back up this second radical claim—that only philosophers can have knowledge—Socrates paints a fascinating metaphysical and epistemological picture. He divides all of existence up into three classes: what is completely, what is in no way, and what both is and is not. What is completely, he tells us, is completely knowable; what is in no way is the object of ignorance; what both is and is not is the object of opinion or belief. The only things that are completely are the Forms. Only the Form of the B eautiful is completely beautiful, only the Form of Sweetness is completely sweet, and so on. Sensible particulars both are and are not. Even the sweetest apple is also mixed in with some sourness—or not-sweetness. Even the most beautiful woman is plain—or not-beautiful—when judged against certain standards. So we can only know about Forms, and not about sensible particulars. That is why only philosophers can have knowledge, because only they have access to the Forms. Analysis: Book V, 471e-end In this section Plato makes one of the most important claims of the book: only the philosopher has knowledge. In fact, if we read the Republic as a defense of the activity of philosophy, as Allan Bloom suggests, then this might be viewed as the most important claim. It explains why philosophy is crucial to the life of the city, rather than a threat to society. The argument for this claim proceeds, roughly, as follows. Only “what is completely” is completely knowable. Only the Forms count as “what is completely.” Only philosophers have access to the Forms. Only the philosophers have kno wledge. That only the Forms qualify as “what is completely” is a radical and contentious idea. Can a beautiful woman be completely beautiful? Is it not the case that she is only beautiful according to some standards, and not according to others? Compared to a goddess, for instance, she would probably appear plain. So the beautiful woman is not completely beautiful. No sensible particular can be completely anything—judged by some standards, or viewed in some way, it will lack that quality. It will certainly lose the quality over time. Nothing is sweet forever; fruit eventually withers, rots, dessicates. Nothing is beautiful forever; objects eventually corrode, age, or perish. The Form of Beauty is nothing but pure beauty that lasts without alteration forever . In Plato’s conception, all Forms possess their singular qualities completely, eternally, and without change. That only “what is completely” is completely knowable is a difficult idea to accept, even when we understand what Plato means to indicate by speaking of the Forms. Consider our beautiful woman. Remember that she is at the same time both beautiful and not beautiful and that her beauty must inevitably fade. So how can we know that she is beautiful, when she is not completely or permanently beautiful? To think that she is beautiful cannot amount to knowledge if it is partially false. But why can we not say that we know exactly in what way she is beautiful and in what ways not, that we know the whole picture? The reason that th is does not work is that our beautiful woman is a changing entity, as are all sensible particulars. Since she herself is a changing entity, our grasp of her, if it is correct, has to change as well. Plato is adamant that knowledge does not chan ge. Knowledge for Plato, as for Aristotle and many thinkers since, consists in eternal, unchanging, absolute truths, the kind that he would count as scientific. Since knowledge is limited to eternal, unchanging, absolute truths, it cannot app ly to the ever changing details of the sensible world. It can only apply to what is completely—to what is stable and eternally unchanging. Plato, some might claim, is making a mistake in leaping from the claim that knowledge must apply to stable, unchanging truths to the claim that knowledge only applies to Forms. His student Aristotle also believed that knowledge is limited to eternal and absolute truths, but he found a way to let knowledge apply to the world we observe around us by limiting knowledge to classes or kinds. We can have knowledge, in Aristotle’s view, about human beings, but not about any particular human being. Classes, he realized, are stable and eternal, even if the particular entities that make them up are not. In this section there are distinct echoes of earlier philosophers. In dividing all of existence up into three classes (what is completely, what is not at all, and what both is and is not), Plato draws on elements of pre-Socratic theories and synthesizes these elements into a coherent worldview. Parmenides is echoed in the extremes: in what is completely and in what is not at all. Parmenides spoke a great deal ab out “what is” and “what is not.” He argued that all that exists—“what is”—is a single, unchanging, eternal thing—an entity that in many ways resembles the Forms (though it differs from the Forms, for instance, in that Parmenides’ “what is” was a singular entity, while Plato allows for multiple Forms). Everything else, he said, is not at all. While Parmenides would have sympathized with Plato’s two extremes, he would have strenuously objected to the existence of the middle realm—what both is and is not. By partaking of both “what is” and “what is not,” this realm would have severely violated logic. This realm, though, does have strong ties to another pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus. One of Heraclitus’ main doctrines was a theory concerning unity of opposites: the idea that whatever is beautiful is also ugly, whatever up also down, and so forth. He believed that the entire world was composed out of these unities of opposites and that the key to understanding nature was to understand how these opposites cohered. Summary: Book VII, 514a- 521d In Book VII, Socrates presents the most beautiful and famous metaphor in Western philosophy: the allegory of the cave. This metaphor is meant to illustrate the effects of education on the human soul. Education moves the philosopher...