Encyclopedia of Philosophy: PLATO'S REPUBLIC

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Women as well as men are to be rulers and soldiers, but the members of these classes are notallowed to marry.

Women are to be held in common, and all intercourse is to be public.

Procreation is to be strictlyregulated in order that the population remains stable and healthy.

Children are to be brought up in public crecheswithout contact with their parents.

Guardians and auxiliaries are to be debarred from possessing private property, ortouching precious metals; they will live in common like soldiers in camp, and receive, free of charge, adequate butmodest provisions.The life of these rulers may not sound attractive, Socrates concedes, but the happiness of the city is moreimportant than the happiness of a class.

If the city itself is to be happy it must be a virtuous city, and the virtuesof the city depend on the virtues of the classes which make it up.Four virtues stand out as paramount: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice.

The wisdom of the city is thewisdom of its rulers; the courage of the city is the courage of its soldiers; and the temperance of the city consistsin the submissiveness of the artisans to the rulers.

Where then is justice? It is rooted in the principle of the divisionof labour from which the city-state originated: every citizen, and each class, doing that for which they are mostsuited.

Justice is doing one's own thing, or minding one's own business: it is harmony between the classes.The state which Socrates imagines is one of ruthless totalitarianism, devoid of privacy, full of deceit, in flagrantconflict with the most basic human rights.

If Plato meant the description to be taken as a blueprint for a real-lifepolity, then he deserves all the obloquy which has been heaped on him by conservatives and liberals alike.

But itmust be remembered that the explicit purpose of this constitution-mongering was to cast light on the nature ofjustice in the soul; and that is what Socrates goes on to do.He proposes that there are three elements in the soul corresponding to the three classes in the imagined state.

‘Dowe,' he asks, ‘gain knowledge with one part, feel anger with another, and with yet a third desire the pleasures offood, sex and so on? Or is the whole soul at work in every impulse and in all these forms of behaviour?' To settle thequestion he appeals to phenomena of mental conflict.

A man may be thirsty and yet unwilling to drink; what impelsto an action must be distinct from what restrains from it; so there must be one part of the soul which reflects andanother which is the vehicle of hunger, thirst, and sexual desire.

These two elements can be called reason andappetite.

Now anger cannot be attributed to either of these elements; for anger conflicts with appetite (one can bedisgusted with one's own perverted desires) and can be divorced from reason (children have tantrums before theyreach the years of discretion).

So we must postulate a third element in the soul, temper, to go with reason andappetite.This division is based on two premisses: the principle of non-contrariety, and the identification of the parts of thesoul by their desires.

If X and Y are contrary relations, nothing can unqualifiedly stand in X and Y to the same thing;and desire and aversion are contrary relations.

The desires of appetite are clear enough, and the desires of temperare to fight and punish; but we are not at this point told anything about the desires of reason.

No doubt the man inwhom reason fights with thirst is one who is under doctor's orders not to drink; in which case the opponent ofappetite will be the rational desire for health.Socrates' thesis is that justice in an individual is harmony, and injustice is discord, between these three parts of thesoul.

Justice in the state meant that each of the three orders was doing its own proper work.

‘Each one of uslikewise will be a just person, fulfilling his proper function, only if the several parts of our nature fulfil theirs.' Reasonis to rule, educated temper to be its ally, both are to govern the insatiable appetites and prevent them goingbeyond bounds.

Like justice, the other three cardinal virtues relate to the psychic elements: courage will be locatedin temper, temperance will reside in the unanimity of the three elements, and wisdom will be in ‘that small part whichrules .

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possessing as it does the knowledge of what is good for each of the three elements and for all of them incommon'.Justice in the soul is a prerequisite even for the pursuits of the avaricious and ambitious man, the making of moneyand the affairs of state.

Injustice is a sort of civil strife among the elements when they usurp each other'sfunctions.

‘Justice is produced in the soul, like health in the body, by establishing the elements concerned in theirnatural relations of control and subordination, whereas injustice is like disease and means that this natural order issubverted.' Since virtue is the health of the soul, it is absurd to ask whether it is more profitable to live justly or todo wrong.

All the wealth and power in the world cannot make life worth living when the bodily constitution is goingto rack and ruin; and can life be worth living when the very principle whereby we live is deranged and corrupted?We have now reached the end of the fourth of the ten books of the Republic, and the dialectical process hasmoved on several stages.

One of the hypotheses assumed against Thrasymachus was that it is the soul's functionto deliberate, rule, and take care of the person.

Now that the soul has been divided into reason, appetite, andtemper, this is abandoned: these functions belong not to the whole soul but only to reason.

Another hypothesis isemployed in the establishment of the trichotomy: the principle of non-contrariety.

This, it turns out, is not aprinciple which can be relied on in the everyday world.

In that world, whatever is moving is also in some respectstationary; whatever is beautiful is also in some way ugly.

Only the Idea of Beauty neither waxes nor wanes, is notbeautiful in one part and ugly in another, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another, nor beautiful in relation toone thing and ugly in relation to another.

All terrestrial entities, including the tripartite soul, are infected by theubiquity of contrariety.

The theory of the tripartite soul is only an approximation to the truth, because it makes nomention of the Ideas.In the Republic these make their first appearance in Book Five, where they are used as the basis of a distinctionbetween two mental powers or states of mind, knowledge and opinion.

The rulers in an ideal state must beeducated in such a way that they achieve true knowledge; and knowledge concerns the Ideas, which alone really are (i.e., for any F, only the idea of F is altogether and without qualification F).

Opinion, on the other hand,concerns the pedestrian objects which both are and are not (i.e., for any F, anything in the world which is F is alsoin some respect or other not F).These powers are in turn subdivided, with the aid of a line diagram (see below), in Book Six: opinion includes twoitems, (a) imagination, whose objects are ‘shadows and reflections', and (b) belief, whose objects are ‘the living. »