It is striking to consider how Socrates in Plato’s Republic tackled the issue of justice, and the "ideal-state” he envisioned in order to discover justice within the “individual” as he faced off his critics, notably Thrasymachus and Glaucon, in one of the most in-depth debates ever recorded in ancient philosophical history.
The question of “justice” presents, in my opinion, one of the most intrinsic philosophical problems ever to face modern academic inquiry. It is for this purpose that I hold it most important that the strategies utilized by the ancient thinkers Plato and Socrates to explain “justice as a virtue” be studied with the most careful analysis, lest there be confusion about the Republic’s intent, which can already be seen with some modern thinkers concluding hastily that Socrates was a totalitarian.
I will counter this by showing that Platonic idealism’s focus is specifically on justice within the human soul and not on the “infamous” idealized state that Socrates constructed. I will achieve this by first defining Socrates’ definition of justice within the human soul and the city, which I will then follow with giving a brief analysis on Socrates’ view of how a “just life is the happiest life”. Lastly, I will conclude my analysis with focus on the mystery of whether or not Socrates indeed viewed his philosophical masterpiece, the “just city”, as something that could be realized within reality.
Socrates’ conjecture on justice in the city and soul centered upon a crucial premise highlighting an internal balance between characteristics of the Tripartite Soul (reason, passion and the bodily appetites), with which Socrates and Plato both acknowledged that justice is attained in an individual and in society when each of these functions of the “soul” are working in harmony with one another by fulfilling each one’s individual purpose without interfering with one another.
Such balance is important both for the “ideal state” as proposed in the Republic and for the individual. For all these functions, however, it is reason that should govern the soul through wisdom by consensus between itself and the other elements of the soul.
According to D.R. Bhandari, “…reason and spirit have to control these appetites which are likely to grow on the bodily pleasures. These appetites should not be allowed to enslave the other elements and usurp the dominion to which they have no right. When all the three agree that among them the reason alone should rule, there is justice within the individual”.
The purpose of Socrates’s premise was to show how the benefits of leading a just life supersede those apparently linked with living unjustly and how the harmonious nature associated with justice establishes its superiority to injustice from the outset.
In the Republic, Plato attempts to draw connections between the human body, soul and the political community with an idea that, in theory, could be the general feature behind when we define each of these areas as being in “good condition”.
In other words, when we say of the soul, human body and the political community that they are in good condition, there is a common feature among all of them that we are referring to, and this connecting feature is what allows us to correctly identify them as being good. This common feature could be theorized in the context of the soul to be when certain components of the soul itself are in a certain order.
It is clear from this that Socrates identifies justice as an internal condition that can be found anywhere and not an external one that can simply be used by different societies. To solidify this argument, Plato notes Socrates’ utilization of an “ideal state” of governance upon which a tripartite correspondence can be drawn between a city-state and the human soul that exhibit similar components in structure to one another.
Socrates, through Plato’s descriptions, believes that he can best achieve this by analyzing the best possible city, and identify that the tripartite structure of the ideal city corresponds to the tripartite structure of the “just soul”. The idea is that if a correspondence does exist between an “ideal state” and the human soul, then it would stand to reason that the “ideal person”, who is just, in effect will exhibit the same kind of tripartite structure found in the in the “ideal political community”.
This, according to the logic found in Plato’s Republic, would prove, to an extent, that a just life is far more advantageous than living unjustly. This “ideal state” would be comprised of a three-level system. At the top, “reason” would be personified in an elite group of guardians referred to as the “philosopher-kings”, who would be highly trained individuals that will utilize their mastery of reason to construct the policies of the state.
The second-tier, identified as the “passions”, will be personified into an active military that would provide the protection for the state. At the bottom of this structure, the “bodily appetites”, will be personified into the common merchants and traders who would provide for the economic well-being of the state. When each one of these parts are working in accord with each other, justice will be attained.
It is important that we analyze the elements that support this theory. Harmony seems to be one of the key elements of Socrates’ argument for justice.
For example, in the same way that good health in the body could be seen as a depiction of its parts working harmoniously with one another to attain such good health, so justice as a “good” is the result of its components (reason, passions and the bodily appetites) fulfilling each of their designated functions to attain that justice.
Such a reality exists in both the ideal state that Socrates created himself and in the individual human soul. Education is another important element of Socrates’ argument.
Specifically, Plato, in his work, notes Socrates’ conjecturing that individuals must be educated in order to dispense with the worldly pleasures to pursue knowledge of the Forms, the objects the understanding of which present the goals of the philosopher’s education such as beauty, goodness and justice. T
he philosopher lives a more fulfilled life because the pursuit of the knowledge of these Forms develops in him an elite capacity to reason, which is the cardinal ethic upon which the soul and ideal state’s tripartite structure of justice is supposed to be built and governed.
Happiness, as an element, was one of the primary focuses of the debates on justice recorded in the Republic, notably between Thrasymachus (who first argued that justice is merely the advantage of the strong), Glaucon (who argued that to be unjust would yield the greater happiness) and Socrates.
Specifically, Socrates would argue that justice produces the greatest happiness. According to James Butler, “Rather, justice is 'welcomed for its own sake' as a means to happiness in a perfectly ordinary causal way: justice produces the happiest life.”
But it is important to ask why exactly Socrates posited that the just life is the happiest life, both for women and for men. There are three proofs Socrates utilized in order to answer this question. However, the third proof, considered by Socrates to be the strongest argument, provides the clearest depiction of why Socrates thought the way he did.
The third proof is comprised of the following conclusions: being filled with reason, knowledge and the Forms is pleasurable and the just soul, with reason ascending the other two parts of the soul, attains the best and truest pleasures throughout its life.
Socrates then ventures to conclude from this that the just person lives a more pleasant and fulfilled life in comparison with the unjust person . The unjust person would only live under the influence of his or her own confusion, unfulfilled desires and pains as result of failing to be just. This identifies whom Socrates would deem as the tyrant in Book IX of the Republic.
In the text, Socrates posits the philosopher-king of his ideal city as the happiest and most just of people, with the tyrant who lives unjustly being the most wretched of them all. Though he is able to live, kill and do as he pleases, he is thus never able to escape enslavement to his own lustful devices and is henceforth miserable, deceiving himself into an illusion of happiness.
As Socrates states in the Republic, “In truth, then and whatever people may think, a real tyrant is really a slave, compelled to engage in the worst kind of fawning, slavery, pandering to the worst kind of people. He’s so far from satisfying his desires in any way that it is clear – if one happens to know that one must study his whole soul – that he’s in the greatest need of most things and truly poor”(579e).
The tyrant’s wretchedness would come as a result of his inability to control the appetites that drive him, so it would then be misleading to call his revelry in his power as “happiness”. The philosopher, who lives justly, is driven by reason and order, and is not enslaved by the physical appetites like his “tyrant” counterpart.
The pleasures that the unjust tyrant seeks are his masters, due to his life of disorder, leading him to regret and eventual agony because his unlimited appetite for pleasure is never satisfied. The philosopher by contrast lives an autonomous life and is able to do what he or she wants, because the just life, according to Socrates, is not enslaved by the bodily pleasures but is governed by reason and harmonious living as a result of his justice, allowing the philosopher to live a happier lifestyle.
Such an argument refuted the original proposition of his critic Glaucon, who posited that living unjustly yielded greater pleasures and would therefore be the best kind of life to live.
Socrates further contended that physical pleasures could in fact be relative, since physical pleasures mostly pertain to the “bodily appetites”, and usually will merely indicate the absence of pain. But these “pleasures” in and of themselves are not purely “pleasurable” for their own sakes.
There are other desires, such as truth and honor for example, that yield pleasures purely as an effect of their gratification and are “goods” purely for the sake of themselves; not simply for the pleasures attached to them.
In essence, in this Socrates draws a distinction between two parts of the soul: the purely appetitive and the rational.
The rational part of the soul is in line with Plato’s glorification of the philosopher who seeks knowledge of the intrinsic goods that transcend appetite (The Forms). The appetitive part of the soul is that which pursues physical pleasures.
For those who neglect knowledge of the Forms, Socrates would conjecture that they are living in a dream-world of illusion, mistaking certain objects for the intrinsic goods like “beauty” and thinking these objects to be “beauty” in and of itself.
We can reference such an idea to Socrates’ famous Cave Allegory found in 514a-520a of the Republic. In the analogy, Socrates imagines prisoners chained to the wall of a cave staring at its blankness for the entirety of their lives with a fire burning behind them.
As objects passed in front of the fire the people would watch the shadows that were projected onto the wall, and they would give them names. These images, according to the analogy, would be mistaken for “reality” in the eyes of the prisoners.
To make his point, Socrates posited that the philosopher is like a prisoner that has been freed from his chains while subsequently coming to the realization that the shadows projected on the wall weren’t in fact reality at all but elements of manufactured reality. It is from here that the philosopher comes to discover true enlightenment.
The “fire casting shadows” in the analogy could be theorized to be a depiction of human nature being enslaved to the reality we perceive purely by the faultiness of our senses as opposed to reason. When we are freed from this “imprisonment” and are given illumination to the truth, true happiness ensues because we have given ourselves over to the philosophical pursuit of the knowledge of the abstract objects (The Forms).
The philosopher’s connection to these abstract objects, as Plato writes that Socrates would assert, is what makes his or her life more satisfactory, pleasurable and happy than any other life that could potentially be lived.
Now a prevailing debate that has pervaded discussion on the Republic is whether or not such an idealistic state could in fact be realizable in the eyes of Socrates. I would argue that the answer to this debate is that Socrates was simply using speculative metaphysics in order to highlight the importance of transcendent truths for the purpose of changing the way people pondered about justice as it pertained to the individual soul. The assumption that Socrates, let alone Plato, was arguing for totalitarian rule, seems to miss the entire premise for the Republic.
In fact, Socrates’ dialogue with Glaucon could be deemed as a tool utilized by Plato to change his readers’ imaginative abilities.
According to Melissa Lane, “If Plato’s fundamental project is not actually to offer a blueprint for building such a society, but rather to transform his readers’ and so his society’s (and later societies’) imagination by means of writing and reading, then the charge of totalitarianism cannot apply directly.”
This is significant, considering that passages within the Republic itself seem to argue against the propensity of philosophers becoming engrossed in politics in the physical world. For example, according to this passage from Book I of the Republic, which shows Socrates responding to Thrasymachus over his assertion that justice is the advantage of the “stronger”, “In a city of good men, if it came into being, the citizens would fight in order not to rule”(347d).
This is a strong indicator of Socrates’ position that his “ideal state” was simply an “ideal state” and not something that could potentially exist in reality as is indicated by his assertion that such a city is not currently in a state of “being” but virtually non-existent by all points of reason.
The kind of parameters Socrates set in place for the “philosopher-kings” could plausibly be seen to exist so far outside the confines of reality that his suggestions throughout the Republic of the need for “philosopher-rule” could purely be seen as merely a metaphorical argument to expound on the broader aspect of “justice as virtue” to prove his point against Glaucon’s criticisms, but not that he thought that such rule could actually exist in reality.
Consider another passage from Book V of the Republic, “Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophize, that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide, while the many natures who are present pursue either one exclusively are forcibly prevented from doing do, cities will have no rest from evils…” (473d).
Socrates here acknowledges the existence of current present forces in nature that prevent the “joining together” of political power and philosophy, further granting weight to the assertion that he did not consider his “just city” to be realizable.
Also, one of the basic tenets of Socrates’ “just city” is that it operates on the assumption that if every contributing part of society (reason, the passions, and the bodily appetites) each did according to their own crafts with enjoyment and skill, justice would thenceforth ensue.
However, it is very difficult to imagine that such generalization, where everyone is skilled and experiences “enjoyment” in their work, could actually exist, so it doesn’t seem as if Socrates’ argument was to posit that such a “perfect city” could in fact be realizable under the present circumstances of nature.
Rather than conjecturing that Socrates’ envisioning of the ideal state was for the purpose of creating an “ideal state” itself, it is important that we consider the context of why he raised the idea of such a hypothetical city in the first place.
In Book II of the Republic, Socrates makes a point in distinguishing between the justice of a single man and the justice of a city (See Republic 368e-369a) and that before discovering justice in the individual, it would make sense to look for it in the city first, since it is larger.
After establishing “justice in the city”, he could then observe a similar structure of justice within the individual if such a similarity exists. It would again stand to reason that Socrates’ goal entirely was to establish justice as a human virtue, and the “ideal state” was merely a “means to an end” to fortify his positions.
Perhaps the most convincing evidence that Socrates’ never thought his city to be “realized” is found at the end of Book IX of the Republic. Specifically, after establishing that the philosopher-rulers’ commitment to avoiding public and private honor to further avoid corrupting his conditioned soul would disqualify him from politics in his “fatherland” but qualify him for politics in “his own city”, his critic Glaucon makes the clarifying note that the “philosopher-ruler” would be “…willing to take part in the politics of the city we were founding and describing, the one that exists in theory, for I don’t think it exists anywhere on earth” (592a).
Socrates would then proceed to agree with Glaucon by positing that such a model city could exist in heaven for the purpose of anyone who would want to look at it and make himself a citizen of that city based on what he sees, drawing attention again to the importance of justice as a human virtue over the potential existence of his proposed “city” (592b). In essence, such a city is agreed upon by the two contending philosophers to only exist in theory and not in reality.
It would appear as if the typical argument for the idea that Plato’s Republic advocates for a totalitarian “rule of the few” is predicated purely upon the misleading premise that Socrates’ “just city” was the core focus of the work. But upon further analysis, we can determine that this wasn’t at all the purpose of Socrates’ debate with his critics.
The concern from the outset was “justice within the individual” and not within a “city”. Notable libertarian Professor of Philosophy at Bridgewater State University Aeon Skoble even reprimanded thinkers that immediately tried to write off Socrates and Plato as proto-fascists. He posits that Plato never engaged in utopian political theory to begin with and that the hypothetical “city” generated within the Republic was purely hypothetical. He further confirms that the concern within the entire dialogue between Glaucon and Socrates was “justice as a human virtue” and that the city was merely a tool used to prove a point about this human virtue.
According to Skoble, “The thought experiment is built on the analogy between how a city is organized and how a person’s character is organized. Since “justice” is potentially a property both of societies and of individuals, the features of a just city that make it just would be features that, if we lived according to them, would make us just”.
Indeed, even for a master thinker like Socrates, proving justice as an intrinsic human virtue would be extremely difficult. However, it is my opinion that such difficulty had nothing to do with Socrates’ argument lacking in logic but instead had to do with a recurring flaw of injustice and disorder in humanity.
Such a reality may not necessarily posit that “justice as a virtue” is non-existent, but the ideal form of Socrates’ view of justice could be theorized to be just as unrealizable as Socrates’ “ideal city”.
It would make sense that we then consider ourselves ignorant, as Socrates claimed himself to be in The Apology, in order that we may reach for new heights in our pursuit of justice through attaining knowledge of the transcendent truths Socrates cherished. Plato’s Republic is not a totalitarian manifesto.
Rather, one could look at it as an early tool used to attract readers to entertain questions such as the “question of justice”, perhaps in the hopes that future generations might find better answers than Socrates did.
I’d like to think that showing that justice is a human virtue would benefit us all as members of humankind, which is why I believe and hold that an issue such as this is and should still be debated today fiercely to finish what Plato’s Republic started.
Joseph Vazquez III
Bibliography:
Bhandari, D.R. 2000. "Plato's Concept of Justice: An Analysis." Boston University. July 7. https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Anci/AnciBhan.htm. (Accessed 15 June, 2017)
Kraut, Richard. 1992. The Cambridge Companion to Plato. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Butler, James, 2002. "Justice and the Fundamental Question of Plato's Republic". Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science Vol. 35, No. 1 (March 2002): 1-18. JSTOR (40913912) http://www.jstor.org.proxygw.wrlc.org/stable/pdf/4... (Accessed 15 June, 2017)
Cohen, S. Marc, and Patricia, Reeve, C.D.C. Curd. 2011. Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company
Brown, Eric, "Plato's Ethics and Politics in The Republic", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
Moss, Jessica. 2006. "Pleasure and Illusion in Plato", New York University. 1-47. http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/moss/Pl... (Accessed 15 June, 2017)
Lane, Melissa. "Eco-Republic: What The Ancietns Can Teach Us About Ethics, Virtue and Sustainable Living". Princeton University Press (2012): 1-17. JSTOR (j.ctt1r2df3.11) http://www.jstor.org.proxygw.wrlc.org/stable/pdf/j... (Accessed 15 June, 2017)
Aeon, Skoble. 2016. “ Plato Wasn’t Fully Liberal, Nor Was He Totalitarian”. The Foundation for Economic Education. September 25.https://fee.org/articles/plato-wasn-t-fully-liberal-but-was-no-totalitarian-either/(Accessed 15 June, 2017)
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[1] D.R. Bhandari, “Plato’s Concept of Justice: An Analysis”, Boston University, 7 July, 2000, https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Anci/AnciBhan.htm (Accessed 15 June, 2017)
[2] Kraut, The Cambridge Companion to Plato, 315.
[3] Ibid.,316.
[4] Kraut, The Cambridge Companion to Plato, 319.
[5] James Butler, “Justice and the Fundamental Question of Plato’s ‘Republic’”, Apeiron: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science, Vol. 35, No. 1 (March 2002): 2. JSTOR (40913912) (Note: URL in next page) http://www.jstor.org.proxygw.wrlc.org/stable/pdf/40913912.pdf?refreqid=search%3A92844ab3ac12eed6a8f5b4d0742b7ce5 (Accessed 15 June, 2017)
[6] Rep. 579e, quoted in Cohen, Curd, and Reeve, eds., Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle, 602.
[7] Eric Brown “Plato’s Ethics and Politics in the Republic”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011,
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics-politics/#3.2 (Accessed 15 June, 2017)
[8] Jessica Ross, “Pleasure and Illusion in Plato”, New York University, 2006, 20 http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/moss/PleasureandIllusion.pdf (Accessed 15 June, 2017)
[9] Rep. 514a-520a, quoted Cohen, Curd, and Reeve, eds., Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle, 542-547.
[10] Richard Kraut, The Cambridge Companion to Plato, 317
[11] Melissa Lane, “Eco-Republic: What the Ancients Can Teach Us About Ethics, Virtue and Sustainable Living”, Princeton University Press (2012): 92. JSTOR (j.ctt.1r2df3.11) http://www.jstor.org.proxygw.wrlc.org/stable/pdf/j.ctt1r2df3.11.pdf?refreqid=search%3Aaac23716fe9f89b937806f9876f8ce93 (Accessed 15 June, 2017)
[12] Rep. 347d, quoted in Cohen, Curd, and Reeve, eds., Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle, 389.
[13] Rep. 473d, quoted in Cohen, Curd, and Reeve, eds., Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle, 507.
[14] Rep. 592a, quoted in Cohen, Curd, and Reeve, eds., Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle, 615 .
[15] Rep. 592b quoted in Ibid., 615
[16] Aeon Skoble, “Plato Wasn’t Fully Liberal, Nor Was He Totalitarian”, The Foundation for Economic Education, 25 Sept., 2016,https://fee.org/articles/plato-wasn-t-fully-liberal-but-was-no-totalitarian-either/ (Accessed 15 June, 2017)
