Analogizing Justice: Book 2 of Plato’s Republic

Once Thrasymachus leaves the two brothers, Glaucon and Adimantus, are unsatisfied. The first question pressed upon Socrates might not seem to be about justice, but consider the way the discussion left off: Which pays off in life as a whole?

For tell me, do you agree that there is a kind of good which we would choose to possess, not from desire for its aftereffects, but welcoming it for its own sake?1

In fact, this becomes a division of three kinds of goods: The first kind of good is that which is sought for its own sake; the second kind of good that which is good in itself, but also does no harm and does other good; and the third, only for the rewards they bring.2

Justice: Essential and Efficient

Ultimately, Glaucon wants to know two things: (i.) What are justice and injustice in themselves? and (ii.) What is the virtue of justice and the vice of injustice in the soul?3 They suspect—in agreement with their mentor Socrates—that justice must be what it is, essentially, such that if there were no just or unjust things in this changing realm, justice itself would be just as it always was and always must be.

However, if justice makes good on those claims, then it also makes men good, or, shall we say, just. Moral beings ought to be more or less just insofar as they practice whatever justice is, or shun it, as the case may be.

But to make the devil’s advocate argument as tight as possible, Glaucon channels a thesis from the distant Western future:

By nature, they say, to commit injustice is a good and to suffer it is an evil, but that the excess of evil in being wronged is greater than the excess of good in doing wrong, so that when men do wrong and are wronged by one another and taste of both, those who lack the power to avoid the one and take the other determine that it is for their profit to make a compact with one another neither to commit nor to suffer injustice, and that this is the beginning of legislation and of covenants between men, and that they name the commandment of the law the lawful and the just and that this is the genesis and essential nature of justice—a compromise between the best, which is to do wrong with impunity, and the worst, which is to be wronged and be impotent to get one’s revenge. Justice, they tell us, being midway between the two, is accepted and approved, not as real good, but as a thing honored in the lack of vigor to do injustice, since anyone who had the power to do it and was in reality ‘a man’ with never make a compact with anybody neither to wrong nor be wronged, for he would be mad.4

In his book On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Friedrich Nietzsche would paint just such a picture in which morality arose as a kind of bargain. There were two basic kinds of morality in the ancient world: master morality and slave morality. The former belonged to the strong and well-to-do, who called “good” what was advantageous to their pursuits and “bad” the plight of the weak. Naturally there became more and more of the weak, so that in order to protect their own interests—though Nietzsche would attribute it chiefly to resentment—they banded together to suppress the more admirable traits of the human will by means of inculcating the sense of duty, mutuality, and an associated set of feelings such as sympathy. Taken together, this became morality.

The parallels to Freud on the origins of guilt and Marx on religion and property are easily drawn as well. One might say that Socrates was on a mission to suppress such nihilistic suspicions from forming an alternative moral code at the dawn of Western philosophy. He had certainly run into enough precursors in the Sophists.   

In order to test Socrates, the brother, Adimantus cites the ancient story of Gyges and his ring. Perhaps some Tolkien expert could tell me, but I cannot help but think the idea for the ring that Golem and the Baggins tried their turns at was from this. It was a ring which made its wearer invisible with one turn, and back to visible by turning it back. So, said the brother, “If now there should be two such rings, and the just man should put on one and the unjust the other … both would pursue the same course.”5 That is the cynical majority hypothesis.

To run the test, the unjust must be perfected in injustice, and likewise the just, being stripped of reputation and so forth, since the appearance of justice when one is not is the height of injustice, and there is no way for the masses to tell. Furthermore, withhold this all the way to death, so that there is no other good to be pursued by the just man but justice.

The rationale is similar to Satan’s in his charge against Job to God: “You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face” (1:10-11). Job’s morality, in other words, must be a mercenary morality: only for the temporal good he can get by it. Just so with the “just man’s” pursuit of justice. It is all a show.

For the height of injustice is to seem just without being so. To the perfectly unjust man, then, we must assign perfect injustice and withhold nothing of it, but we must allow him, while committing the greatest wrongs, to have secured for himself the greatest reputation for justice.6

The conversation turns several times to the relationship between the divine and human. As with justice—a dimension of God and man—so with the whole. Adimantus advances the argument well by proposing that all hinges on whether or not divine beings such as would affect our piety (1) exist, (2) know and care, (3) can be manipulated.7 They will come back to this several times.

An Analogy and an Experiment

He has still to define justice. What if we could see what justice and injustice do to the soul? But these are invisible. So what if we could “magnify” the soul to get a better view? Here is the step Socrates takes to make the city a soul writ large, or, to show the soul as a microcosm of society.

Contrary to those who have handled Plato only second-hand, his contrivance here was not to advocate for either communism or fascism in the ancient world. No doubt Plato was a bitter opponent of democracy, not least because how the mob had handled his mentor.

We must conclude that what Socrates says about this republic is no “mere” thought experiment. Clearly Plato believes in such measures and principles. However, the most basic reason for this analysis of the city is as an analogy to map out what justice is.

Socrates begins by explaining the rationale for his approach: “we should employ the method of search that we should use if we, with not very keen vision, were bidden to read small letters from a distance, and then someone had observed that these same letters exist elsewhere larger and on a larger surface.” He then explains that, “There is a justice of one man, we say, and, I suppose, also of an entire city?” “Then, perhaps, there would be more justice in the larger object, and more easy to apprehend.”8  Thus they embarked on an experiment of city-formation. Socrates says,

The origin of the city … is to be found in the fact that we do not severally suffice for our own needs, but each of us lacks many things … As a result of this, then, one man calling in another for one service and another for another … gather many into one place … and to this dwelling together we give the name city or state, do we not?9

There is also the aspect of voluntary exchange: “there is an interchange of giving, if it so happens, and taking, because each supposes this to be better for himself.”10

If we follow the process from what they agree is the first five such people in a common relation, one can imagine this either along the lines of Smith or along the lines of Marx. If the former, then what is natural is causal to distribution and stratification; if the latter, then covetous and violent interference deconstructs nature, then reconstructs. But both Smith and Marx see the necessity of a division of labor down to the exact gifts of each individual: Smith by that same invisible hand of providence that composes the daily price signals; Marx by the “needs” of political economy expertly discerned and planned.

The three men only come to the subject of war and the need of a warrior class by speaking of the expansion of the state until it runs into another state. The question of the justice of relating to this other state by alternative means is not here considered.11 No matter. One has to protect what he is building.

The concern for having warriors is greater than that of having cobblers. War is an art. Since each is fit and naturally better at his art that he practices most, all the more reason that the warrior should be occupied in the business of war all of his life. So with the acquisition and maintenance of the skill: “in the same degree that the task of our guardians is the greatest of all, it would require more leisure than any other business and the greatest science and training.”12

The guardians must be of a certain character. “And yet we must have them gentle to their friends and harsh to their enemies, otherwise they will not await their destruction at the hand of others, but will be first themselves in bringing it about.”13 Since this brings under one man the opposites of gentleness and ferocity, Socrates points to the dog as an example of how natural this is. The dog “distinguishes a friendly from a hostile aspect by nothing save his apprehension of the one and his failure to recognize the other.”14

If this dog is the mascot for the aforementioned friend-enemy distinction, then I am not sure he gets us beyond the level of question-begging. If the ideal ruler of Thrasymachus may be deceived as to his own advantage, then surely even a good dog may be deceived about friendly and hostile visitors.

The Making of Guardians

If not just anyone can be guardians, then not just any education will do to make them. The first disciplines mentioned for the education of the guardian class are “gymnastics for the body, and for the soul, music.” Music is treated broadly to include tales: tales are then divided into true and false.

Do you not know, then, that the beginning in every task is the chief thing, especially for any creature that is young and tender? For it is then that it is best molded and takes the impression that one wishes to stamp upon it.” “Shall we, then, thus lightly suffer our children to listen to any chance stories fashioned by any chance teachers and so to take into their minds opinions for the most part contrary to those that we shall think it desirable for them to hold when they are grown up?” “We must begin, then, it seems, by a censorship over our story-makers, and what they do well we must pass and what not, reject.”15

By what standard shall we judge between tales? Here is a precursor to the forms: “The example of the greater stories, I said, will show us the lesser also. For surely the pattern must be the same, and the greater and the less must have a like tendency.”16

Hesiod and Homer told “false stories.” How so? “When anyone images badly in his speech the true nature of gods and heroes, like a painter whose portraits bear no resemblance to his models.” This is especially so when it is “the greatest lie about the things of greatest concernment.”17 There is a suggestion that what the gods do, so will even the warrior class. Thus,

Neither must we admit at all, said I, that gods war with gods and plot against one another and contend—for it is not true either—if we wish our future guardians to deem nothing more shameful than lightly to fall out with one another.18

Neither, then, could God, said I, since he is good, be, as the multitude say, the cause of all things, but for mankind he is the cause of few things, but of many things not the cause. For good things are far fewer with us than evil, and for the good we must assume no other cause than God, but the cause of evil we must look for in other things and not in God.”19

The deep matter of how to parse out the divine decree and the distinct senses of God’s will, not to mention whether we can speak of both efficient and “deficient” causality, is all very interesting and it can be done. But more simply, the relevance of the comparatively “few” good things in this world is telling. Whether Platonists can resist the lurch toward Gnosticism will depend on whether they can carefully distinguish between essential nature and its corruption.

Not content with ruling on a doctrine of God’s sovereignty over the origin of good and evil, Socrates then forbids (by law) the poets from making the divine out to be “a wizard,” as he puts it, able to change shape or form or be manifest as this or that, when in fact, “he is simple and less likely than anything else to depart from his own form ... But God, surely, and everything that belongs to God, is in every way in the best possible state.” Moreover, any change would be either a change for the better or for the worse, both of which are unthinkable.20

Having established that true divinity could not wear many disguises so as to change, yet may the divine take the form “to us” in such a way as to deceive? Socrates says no, and they want to know why. Falsehood is hated by both gods and men. For this reason, “there is no lying poet in God.”21

The natural theology emerging by the end of the Republic’s second book may be liable to all kinds of criticism. First and foremost, the very occasions will be called blameworthy. The pagan deities are all put in the dock for how well they serve as man’s moral examples. This cannot be utterly bad, since Augustine does the same by way of criticizing these in his City of God.

Worse yet—if I may advise the critic of pagan natural theology—Plato puts into the mind and mouth of these brothers the suspicion that atoning sacrifices are themselves a shining example of the attempt to manipulate the divine as a substitute for true virtue. It is where Adimantus comes to the end of his lament that the gods are depicted as favoring the unjust. Why do they do so? If for no other reason, it is often because the unjust make sacrifices and prayers which move them. It is in light of this unseemliness that “not only ordinary men but states believe that there really are remissions of sins and purifications for deeds of injustice, by means of sacrifice and pleasant sport for the living.”22

It will also rightly be said that Plato’s definitions of “good” and “true” are found wanting, so that what constitutes a good end and means in the whole matrix of divine causation, and what counts as a legitimate way to communicate truth—these are not things on which Plato, or his mouthpiece Socrates, have a leg to stand on. After all, he has not yet defined justice, which was his more modest end.

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1. Republic, II:357b

2. Republic, II:357b-c

3. Republic, II:358b

4. Republic, II:358e-359b

5. Republic, II:360b, c

6. Republic, II:361a-b

7. Republic, II:365d-e

8. Republic, II:368d, e

9. Republic, II:369b

10. Republic, II:369c

11. Republic, II:373d-e

12. Republic, II:374d

13. Republic, II:375e

14. Republic, II:375e-376b

15. Republic, II:377b-c

16. Republic, II:377c

17. Republic, II:377d-e

18. Republic, II:378b-c

19. Republic, II:379b-c

20. Republic, II:380d-381b

21. Republic, II:382d

22. Republic, II:364e