#4: Plato's "Republic"

Justice by Desire

Plato's Republic describes an authoritarian society and calls it just; at the same time, it calls a democratic society nearly the most unjust type of society. This is the exact opposite of what many people in our society would believe to be true; however, any group of individuals from our society will have different definitions of justice relating to laws, society, morals, and many other broad topics. This makes sense given the importance society today places on individuality, but any society will be as flawed as the individuals it encompasses. Through creating a perfect society, Socrates discovers justice in its truest form, “the having and doing of one's own” (Stephanus 434a). This applies both to an individual within Socrates' perfectly just society and also to a part of an individual's soul. How do the boundaries of “one's own” get decided? In other words, what is the deciding factor between the just and the unjust? Plato says that it is desire. Every time he talks about justice, he brings the topic of desire into the discussion as well. Justice and desire are inseparable throughout this dialogue. In the analysis of human nature and the body politic in Plato's Republic, the deciding factor between the just and the unjust is desire.

Desire is essentially the central discussion in Socrates' definition of justice within the individual. He has already outlined the three-tiered society in the just city and must now show the parallel within the soul. By cataloging the various human desires, he identifies a rational part that lusts after truth (438d), a spirited part that lusts after honor (441a), and an appetitive part of the soul that lusts after everything else, including food, drink, sex, and especially money (437). These three parts of the soul correspond to the three classes in the just city (435c). 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 a helper to keep the appetitive part in line. Compare 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 entire soul to pursue the desires of that part. In a soul ruled by spirit, 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.

Desire alone is what keeps a just person behaving according to the intuitive norms of justice. Since his soul is ruled by a desire for truth, he will not be in the grips of lust, greed, or desire for honor. Because of this, 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 (444a). His strong desire for truth weakens urges that might lead to vice.

Those who are led more by their desire for knowledge are more just than the others who are not. The people who are the most just are selected to become guardians, and they will become the philosopher-kings of the just city. According to Socrates, only the “truly rich [will] rule—not those who are rich in gold but those are rich in the wealth that the happy must have, namely, a good and rational life” (521a). These guardians are a major topic for Plato's discussion, especially their education. The allegory of the cave, the most famous metaphor in western philosophy, illustrates the effects of education on the human soul. Additionally, it illustrates the effects of the desire for truth on the human soul.

The freed prisoner in the story is supposed to be a guardian, a philosopher-king-to-be. His love for truth and therefore knowledge drives him onward and upward, out of the chains of ignorance. He continues past the shadows on the wall, looking in pain at the fire and the statues. His desire is fed by the realization that these are more real than the shadows. He grasps how the fire and statues together create the shadows he for so long took for reality (515d).

His desire for knowledge forces him upwards, however, past the statues and fire to the dazzling outdoors. He is blinded by the extreme light and can at first only look upon his past. He sees shadows first as he did in the cave. Next, he looks at reflections in water as he saw the statues and the fire. Finally, he is able to look at the objects themselves: the houses, trees, flowers, and everything that exists in the world. He sees that these are even more real than the statues were, that the statues were only copies of these (516a).

From shadows to statues to real things he has progressed, and now he has the potential to glimpse at the most real things. When his eyes have finally adjusted to the brightness, he can lift his sight to the heavens and look at the sun. In a flash, “he would infer and conclude that the sun provides the seasons and the years, governs everything in the visible world, and is in some way the cause of all the things that he used to see” (516c). The sun represents the form of the good, and now the philosopher-king has reached the highest understanding (517b).

Upon successfully reaching this ultimate knowledge his desire that everyone has knowledge drives him back into the cave to spread the truth that is the form of the good. He returns to his peers but is blind in the darkness. His exposure to the dazzling light has made him unable to see that which he saw in his ignorance. He is mocked by his peers when he cannot win their childish games. He tries to teach them the truth he has found, but because they have not taken the journey upward, they are unable to grasp anything he is telling them (516e). This is the plight of the philosopher-king.

In this metaphor, education is not the force driving the prisoner up the path from the cave to the sun and back. That force, leading him through many painful and confusing experiences, is his desire for truth and knowledge. He first wants only to learn and to know the truth. In his return, he wants solely to spread that truth to all.

The overall point of the allegory of the cave is that the desire for truth and knowledge ultimately leads one to the form of the good. Socrates says, “In the knowable realm, the form of the good is the last thing to be seen, and it is reached only with difficulty. Once one has seen it, however, one must conclude that it is the cause of all that is correct and beautiful in anything, that it produces both light and its source in the visible realm, and that in the intelligible realm it controls and provides truth and understanding, so that anyone who is to act sensibly in private or public must see it” (517c). This supports the idea that to Socrates, the form of the good was God; it was held as the “form of forms” and represented all that was right and structured in the universe.

The purest of desires, the desire for truth and knowledge, leads to the purest of structures and therefore the most justice. Conversely, the less pure the desire, the more justice declines. This decline shows how drastic an effect desires have on not only a single ruler but an entire city. Socrates shows this by describing the decline of the just city to each successive unjust city-man pair: the purest is the aristocracy described by Socrates in the majority of the dialogue, ruled by the knowledge-driven man; there is a timocracy, and the honor-driven man who resembles and rules that sort of government; there is oligarchy, which resembles and is ruled by a man driven by his necessary appetites; there is democracy, which resembles and is ruled by a man driven by his unnecessary appetites; and there is tyranny, which resembles and is ruled by a man driven by his unlawful appetites. Each of these constitutions is worse than those before it; tyranny is the most wretched form of government, and the tyrannical man is the most wretched of men (544c).

Because the philosopher-kings of the just city will rely on their fallible sense perception in choosing the next generation of rulers, they will inevitably make mistakes over time. They will “join brides and grooms at the wrong time, the children will be neither good natured nor fortunate. The older generation will choose the best of these children but they are unworthy nonetheless” (546d). These unworthy rulers will want to change things so rulers can have private property and focus on wealth, while the just among the rulers will want to preserve the old order and focus on virtue (546). The resulting compromise of a constitution is timocracy.

The timocratic man is one ruled by spirit. His father is an aristocratic man who encourages the rational part of his son's soul. But the son is influenced by a bad mother and servants, who pull him toward the love of money. He ends up in the middle, becoming a proud and honor-loving man. “He'd be gentle to free people and very obedient to rulers, being himself a lover of ruling and a lover of honor” (549a).

The oligarchic man is a thrifty money-maker. He is a timocrat's son and at first emulates him, but then some disgraceful and unfair mishap befalls his father. The son traumatized and impoverished, turns greedily toward making money and slowly amasses property again. “He makes the rational and spirited parts sit on the ground beneath appetite, one on either side, reducing to slaves” (553d). Reason can only reason about how to make more money, while spirit only values wealth and has as its sole ambition more wealth. This man has evil inclinations, but these are held in check because he is careful about his wealth; he does not want to engage in activity that would threaten him with the loss of what he has managed to build up from scratch (554).

The oligarchic father is ruled by his necessary desires; these are desires we cannot train ourselves to overcome, such as the desire for enough sustenance to survive. The democratic son, on the other hand, is ruled by his unnecessary desires; these are desires which we can train ourselves to overcome, such as the desire for luxurious items and a decadent lifestyle. The miserly father only wanted to hoard his money, whereas the son comes to appreciate all the lavish pleasures money can buy. Manipulated by bad associates, he abandons reverence and moderation and begins to regard anarchy as freedom, extravagance as magnificence, and shamelessness as courage (560).  When he is older, though, some of his virtues return, and he is sometimes pulled toward moderation. Yet he thinks all pleasures (those of moderation and of indulgence) are equal, and he yields to whichever one strikes his fancy at the moment. “There's neither order nor necessity in his life, but he calls it pleasant, free, blessedly happy, and he follows it for as long as he lives” (561e).

The tyrannical man is the son of the democratic man. His father is not lawless, but he does indulge unnecessary desires. Just like the father, the son is exposed to drones, men with lawless desires. But whereas the father had his own oligarchic father's thriftiness to pull him toward the middle road of democracy, this son, brought up on the democratic ethos, moves further toward “all the kinds of lawlessness that those who are leading him call freedom” (572e). He is implanted with a strong erotic love; this love itself acts as a drone, and incites him to all manner of lawlessness. It makes him frenzied and mad, and banishes all sense of shame and moderation (573b).

The tyrannical man is ruled by his lawless desires. Lawless desires draw men toward all sorts of ghastly, shameless, criminal things. Socrates' examples of lawless desires are the desires to sleep with one's mother and to commit a foul murder (571d). All of us have lawless desires according to Socrates; these desires occasionally come out at night in our dreams, when the rational part of us is not on guard. But only the tyrannical man allows these desires to emerge in his waking hours. “Under the tyranny of erotic love, he has permanently become while awake what he used to become occasionally while asleep” (574e).

This man now lives for feasts, revelries, luxuries, and girlfriends (573d). He spends so much money that he soon runs through all he has and needs to begin borrowing (573e). Then, when no one will lend him any more, he resorts to deceit and force (574). We see him running the whole gamut of typically unjust acts in his insatiable need to quench his erotic thirsts; he has become a living nightmare. His desire for erotic love drives this nightmare, keeping him lost in complete anarchy and lawlessness (575a). He will dare to do anything to keep feeding the desires that erotic love produces. Soon he cannot trust anyone and “lives his whole life without being friends to anyone, always a master to one man or a slave to another and never getting a taste of either freedom or true friendship" (576a). The most decent parts of his soul are enslaved to the most vicious part, and so his entire soul is full of disorder and regret and is least free to do what it really wants. He is continually poor, unsatisfied, and he lives in fear (576c).

After this frightening image of the tyrannical life, surely all must agree that no life could be more wretched. Socrates, however, disagrees; there is one sort of life even worse than this one. That is the life of a man who is not only a private tyrant, but who becomes an actual political tyrant (578b). The real tyrant is in a better position to indulge all his awful whims and to sink further into degeneracy. He is in continual danger of being killed in revenge for all the crimes he committed against his subjects, whom he has made into slaves (568e). “A real tyrant is really a slave, compelled to engage in the worst kinds kind of fawning, slavery, and pandering to the worst kind of people. He's so far from satisfying his desires in any way that is it clear that he's in the greatest need of most things and truly poor. And, if indeed his state is like that of the city he rules, then he's full of fear, convulsions, and pains throughout his life” (571e).

Socrates has shown us a compelling reason to believe that justice is worthwhile, that the most just man, the aristocrat, is much happier than the most unjust man, the tyrant (580c). This directly contradicts the dissented verdict reached in Book II that the unjust life is more pleasant than the just one. Socrates' arguments that the just life is more desirable than the unjust life are his long-awaited answer to Glaucon's challenge in Book II to prove the worth of justice in the face of so many who have thrived by way of an unjust life.

Another argument presented by Socrates supporting the worth of justice is that there are three sorts of people in the world: those who desire truth, those who desire honor, and those who desire profit (581c). Each one of these people takes the greatest pleasure in whatever is is they most value and thinks that the best life is the life that involves the most of this pleasure (581d). Yet among these, only one of them can be proved to be right. Only the philosopher “is the finest judge of the three” (582b) because only he has actually experienced all three pleasures. If the philosopher is right, the pleasure one gets from having a just soul, one aiming at reason's desires, is the best kind of pleasure (583a).

The next argument also involves pleasures. Socrates argues that the pleasure of the philosopher is the only real pleasure. All other pleasures are actually relief from pain, not positive pleasure. Other pleasures are not real pleasures because other desires, those not aimed at reason's desires, can never be completely satisfied. All we do is quench these yearnings temporarily, easing the pain of wanting. The philosophical desire can be completely fulfilled by grasping the form of the good (586e).

To conclude his answer to the question posed to him in Book II, Socrates presents two refashioned portraits of the just and unjust man to replace the false portraits outlined in Book II. He asks us to envision that every human being has three animals inside of him: a multi-headed beast, a lion, and a human (588d). If the man behaves unjustly, he is feeding the beast and the lion, making them strong, and starving and weakening the human being so that he gets dragged along wherever the others lead. He also fails to accustom the the parts to one another and leaves them as enemies (589a). If the man behaves justly, he is “saying, first, that all our words and deeds should insure that the human being within this human being has the most control; second, that he should take care of the many-headed beast as a farmer does his animals, feeding and domesticating the gentle heads and preventing the savage ones from growing; and third, that he should make the lion's nature his ally, care for the community of all his parts, and bring them up in such a way that they will be friends with each other and with himself” (589b).

Socrates has done a superb job of proving justice's worth. It is notable that Socrates seems to revisit the discussion of the tripartite soul in his final argument about the three animals. The multi-headed beast is appetite, the lion is spirit, and the human is reason. This beautiful dialogue has come full-circle to the initial point made by Socrates. Justice in the individual, as in the city, involves the correct power relationships among parts with each part occupying its appropriate role. When that relationship is skewed, the entity is no longer just. Therefore, the deciding factor between the just and the unjust is desire.


Works Cited

Plato. Republic. Trans. G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Pub., 1992.