Ordering Justice: Book IV of Plato’s Republic

Soft men make hard times. That maxim lies somewhere close to the surface of the Socratic program of making guardians of the city. We cannot “attach to the guardians a happiness that will make them anything but guardians.”1 Even of those cultural expression we tend to regard as neutral and harmless, we saw that Plato thought otherwise: “For the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions.”2

Arriving at Book IV, following some more talk of culture and legislation, the original question is pursued: namely, to “discover where justice and injustice should be in [the city], wherein they differ from one another, and which of the two he must have who is to be happy, alike whether his condition is known or not known to all gods and men.”3

As in the City, So in the Soul

They search the city to find in which sector belongs three virtues: wisdom, courage, and temperance,4 to somehow get the fourth, which is the real prize: justice. What matters is that “a just man too will not differ at all from a just city in respect of the very form of justice.”5 That makes some sense in light of Plato’s forms. The common property—justice—is what it is, whether the adjective is attached to a man, an action, a law, a goal, or a wider state of affairs. But Socrates has not yet advanced to the full Platonic doctrine.

Instead, Socrates begins with a hypothetical first premise and then supplies the concrete in the second, so that: “if we found some larger thing that contained justice and viewed it there, we should more easily discover its nature in the individual man. And we agreed that this larger thing is the city.”6 The conclusion that such justice will be contained in the man. This is a modus ponens form: (1) p → q, (2) p, (3) ∴ q. Although Socrates keeps a slow pace to allow for the other possibility, that “something different manifests itself in the individual.”

The city, as they have founded it, “will be wise, brave, sober, and just.”7 There is a sense in which wisdom is chief in relation to this search. After all, “there are many and manifold knowledges or sciences in the city.”8 But is the city called “wise” on account of these? Not with respect to the sciences of husbandry, carpentry, nor other craftsmanship. The question is this: “is there any science in the city … which does not take counsel about some particular thing in the city but about the city as a whole and the betterment of its relations with itself and other states?”9 From this Socrates offers what one might call a rudimentary definition of politics:

It is the science of guardianship or government and it is to be found in those rulers to whom we just now gave the name of guardians in the full sense of the word.10

Recall that they had divided the city into three basic classes: 1. guardians / rulers; 2. auxiliaries / soldiers; and 3. artisans / farmers. But how could these make up a fitting analogy to the soul?

They turn to the question of the soul’s three functions, first by an examination of correlates: opposites, objects of desire, relative terms, and objects of knowledge. He fixes upon desire especially, using the example of thirst.

if there is ever something which at the same time pulls it in the opposite way, that something must be an element in the soul other than the one which is thirsting and driving it like a beast to drink ... Now, is it sometimes true that people are thirsty and yet unwilling to drink? … Is it not that there is a something in the soul that bids them drink and a something that forbids, a different something that masters that which bids.11

That which thirsts and that which represses on some other basis cannot be identical. That which represses the base desire must be chief and not base, chief and not equal—reason above mere nature. At this point, one might recall the argument by C. S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, about the moral law. To the objection that what he called “the law” is just our instincts, Lewis compares the instincts to keys on the piano and the law of right and wrong to the sheet of music. None of the keys are “the right key,” but each is right corresponding to the note that makes the music. Consequently,

this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is  itself one of the notes on the keyboard.12

Lewis was considering instincts which are often called for. How much more, then, about Socrates’ focus on base passions.

Socrates’ claim in his own analogy is twofold: If those virtues are the genuine article in the city, we should expect to find the same three elements in the soul, and that they are affected in the same way as are the corresponding types in society.13 Now, there are three things Socrates could mean by “the same forms and qualities are to be found in each one of us that are in the state.”14 Forms in the state cannot arise but from us because: (1) It was “our” creation, whether as their thought experiment or in the ordinary course of human law; (2) A state is made up of nothing but human souls; or (3) Particular governmental forms arise from particular ethnic stocks. He seems to focus on the third with the example of the Thracian and Scythian qualities, as opposed to the Phoenicians and Egyptians. He makes no sharp value judgment here, but simply states it as a fact.

This is important for several reasons. One reason is that it shows how much more liberal ancient “authoritarian” thought could be than its modern counterpart. Think about the wisdom of allowing actual diversity to flourish within a singular law of nature. Modern pluralists wax whimsically about “diversity” by which they mean an indiscriminate mixing of utterly different ways of life. As the violent shaking of multi-colored crystals would soon blend into uniformity, so does this sudden meeting of aliens in one place. There are several predictable consequences to the political realm. Perhaps less obvious is that a forced “diversity” immediate eradicates the distinction between universal principles and particular determinations of law. Everything is now a matter of different strokes for different folks. That will tend either toward a universalization of the claims of one or a few over against other groups, or else an utter factionalism on every question.

It is within a more general liberality that Plato recognizes the distinction between principles and determinations, the latter belonging to matters indifferent. This is the basis for what should be legislated on this grandest scale, and what “they [each distinct people] will easily … discover.” In other words, there is “the preservation of the principles of law,” which must be more universal, which implies the avoidance of “multiplying such petty laws”15 as belong to the myriad specific circumstances. A homogeneous society—one of many, and each a diverse cultural expression—each under a single law of nature, is a less litigious society, a less politicized culture, a less violent life.16  Such a people can more sensibly work out the details which truly remain details, without having to re-litigate every extra-tribal grievance. Plato shuttered at the notion of a political form in which people too unintelligent enough to understand this had any ability to affect policy. They would fail to understand that as homogeneity goes, harmony goes, and the opposite of harmony is violence. Those who force diversity are committing mass violence.

Good Things are Ordered

Circling back to the outset of Book IV and moving through for a distinct theme, the mature reader cannot fail to perceive the place of order. All good things in the life of the city and all good things in the life of the individual—these cease to be what they are, or are aborted before they could become their true form, if there are not limits set on them. Such limits are not arbitrary. They are the form of the thing itself.

Although Plato had not yet arrived at considering forms of government, there are hints in the building analogy. A headless society is a sick society, just as a body not receiving signals from the brain. Socrates makes a useful micro-analogy within the macro-analogy, between politics and medicine. He does this to condemn democracy as a horde of utopians, not of the radical kind perhaps, but as a mob made sick by bestial living turned to every reactive cure.

[The] life of such citizens will resemble that of men who are sick, yet from intemperance are unwilling to abandon their unwholesome regimen … For with all their doctoring they accomplish nothing except to complicate and augment their maladies. And they are always hoping that someone will recommend a panacea that will restore their health.17

Order implies proper arrangement. One piece in a certain place is not “just as good” as any other piece in the same place. This is true of individual actors and of spheres of action. Here, natural gifting and sphere sovereignty converge. “The interference with one another’s business, then, of three existent classes, and the substitution of the one for the other, is the greatest injury to a state and would most rightly be designated as the thing which chiefly works it harm.”18 This too finds its counterpart in the soul: “for the just man does not permit the several elements within him to interfere with one another, or any of them to do the work of others.”19

Order also demands limitations on the scope of a specimen or an organism. For example, Plato limits the size of a republic. The question is posed:

Would not this, then, be the best rule and measure for our government of the proper size of the city and of the territory that they should mark off for a city of that size and seek no more? … [namely] that they should let it grow so long as in its growth it consents to remain a unity, but no further.20

He would not be alone. Aristotle would do the same. So would most other political theorists of note thereafter. The basic reason has to do with the violent—as opposed to natural—flow of power. With increased scale comes increased sloth. Stated conversely, with decreased locality comes decreased human attention and ownership of the body politic. In fact, civic virtue is rendered meaningless as the civitas operates more remotely and holds sway over more people and things that God has not given us to busy ourselves about. The pagan would not quite put it like that, so for Plato, the primary issue is cultural unity. Without cultural unity, there can be no political unity. Those who govern are less “one of us.”

Now all of this order requires an ordering principle, and a first principle (principium) is so named because it is “first” (primum), among people a “first man” (princeps), and so must be above the general order. Life forms have genetics. Puzzles have box tops. Meals have recipes. Each bears the stamp of intelligent design. Each admits of an excellence in that design or order. If there is a spectrum between maximal order and minimal order, then there is a spectrum of better and worse in the art and science of each structure. In short, all harmony requires hierarchy. Hence the composer; and hence the conductor. In both the soul and society, the better part rules the worse. Thus in a soul, we call self-mastery “the control of the worse by the naturally better part.”21 Moreover, in both soul and society, it is a rational hierarchy. That is, the mind is chief of the soul, and a certain wisdom (i.e., philosophy) at the civil helm.

Then it is by virtue of its smallest class and minutest part of itself, and the wisdom that resides therein, in the part which takes the lead and rules, that a city established on principles of nature would be wise as a whole. And as it appears these are by nature the fewest, the class to which it pertains to partake of the knowledge which alone of all forms of knowledge deserves the name of wisdom.22

No doubt, the same people who fixate on what flavor of totalitarian Plato is will also pick out that dimension of hierarchy by which the ancients dispensed with the undesirables. I have already mentioned this in passing. Plato’s manner of expressing it is wholly unnecessary: “that if a degenerate offspring was born to the guardians he must be sent away to the other classes, and likewise if a superior to the others he must be enrolled among the guardians, and the purport of all this was that the other citizens too must be sent to the task for which their natures were fitted, one man to one work,” etc.23 Even modern democratic states have done something like this with a period of time in the teenage years in which one is stratified. It need not involve removing children from households. Evidently, Plato was not interested in softening that blow for anyone.

An Ethic of Virtue-Cultivation

If all our attention in reading Book IV was on the going definition of justice, then we have to admit that Socrates’ own definition is as lame as the one given by Euthyphro at the outset of that dialogue. He calls it here the “principle of doing one’s own business.”24 This may be something justice does, but surely not what it is in essence. One suspects Socrates is only sparring to draw that out of them. It did have one thing going for it, in the construction of the city, where justice was “a quality which made it possible for [the other three virtues] to grow up in the body politic.”25 This remains pragmatic if that is all Socrates is doing.

The good news for the reader is that there is indeed more up the sleeve of Socrates. Markos well summarizes that for Plato, “justice is concerned ‘not with the outward man, but with the inward, which is the true self.’’’26

Now if justice inside the just man is an order of parts, an order of function, an order of scope, and the like, then what about injustice inside the unjust man? Our conversationalists agree that it is “a kind of civil war of these three principles, their meddlesomeness and interference with one another’s functions, and the revolt of one part against the whole of the soul that it may hold therein a rule which does not belong to it, since its nature is such that it befits it to serve as a slave to the ruling principle.”27

If the soul to city analogy is difficult, much easier are those between the body and the soul. Justice is viewed as soundness in this way, and the elements of soundness are certain virtues: “these are in the soul what the healthful and the diseaseful are in the body; there is no difference … Healthful things surely engender health and diseaseful disease … Then does not doing just acts engender justice and unjust injustice?”28

The same analogy is pressed in harmony with Socrates’ vision of justice as the cultivation of virtues: “And is it not likewise the production of justice in the soul to establish its principles in the natural relation of controlling and being controlled by one another, while injustice is to cause the one to rule or be ruled by the other contrary to nature?”29 Naturally, this kind of talk demands that virtue and vice also be defined. Here he is more direct:

Virtue, then, as it seems, would be a kind of health and beauty and good condition of the soul, and vice would be disease, ugliness, and weakness … Then is it not also true that beautiful and honorable pursuits tend to the winning of virtue and the ugly to vice?30

No vision of justice would have satisfied Socrates that did not aim to make men whole, and yes, ultimately happy. If someone could not be happy due to the miseries of a body that is not cared for by proper diet and exercise, much more so: “if a man can only do as he pleases, and pleases to do anything save that which will rid him of evil and injustice and make him possessed of justice and virtue,”31 such a disordered man cannot be a happy man. He may be stimulated. He may procure that stimulated and spiritually numbed life for its duration. But he can be no happier for it, and, in fact, more miserable—to live forever, as vampires, would have been an exponential curse on top of the fundamental curse for the first couple. That is why it was considered a mercy to station the angel to keep them away from the Tree of Life (Gen. 3:22-24). Even permanence, if not joined to other eternal things, opposes blessedness.

But I digress and note that Plato oddly begins a discussion of governmental forms in the last few lines of Book IV. We will therefore treat that subject where its bulk lies in the next book.

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1. Republic, IV:420c

2. Republic, IV:424c

3. Republic, IV:427d

4. Republic, IV:428a-432b

5. Republic, IV:435b

6. Republic, IV:434d-e

7. Republic, IV:427e

8. Republic, IV:428b

9. Republic, IV:428c-d

10. Republic, IV:428d

11. Republic, IV:439b, c

12. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 23.

13. Republic, IV:434d, 435b-c

14. Republic, IV:435e

15. Republic, IV:423b

16. Republic, IV:425e

17. Republic, IV:425e-426a

18. Republic, IV:434c

19. Republic, IV.443d-e

20. Republic, IV:423b

21. Republic, IV:431a

22. Republic, IV:428e-429a

23. Republic, IV:423d

24. Republic, IV:433b

25. Republic, IV:433b

26. Louis Markos, From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic 2021), 40.

27. Republic, IV:444b

28. Republic, IV:444c, d

29. Republic, IV:444d

30. Republic, IV:444d

31. Republic, IV:445b