The Tyrannical Soul and State: Book IX of Plato’s Republic

A madman, an intoxicated man, and a man in love are each pictures of the city—these passions are like those drones which sting. Reason was to be the protector of the soul, yet now has madness for its bodyguard.1 Anyone can see that the life of a city under a tyrant is most miserable, and that under a just king most blessed; but what about the man himself? Socrates says that only a “proper judge” can tell—i.e., “who is able in thought to enter with understanding into the very soul and temper of a man.”2 The tyrannical soul is depicted as out of his own control. He “must of necessity always be needy and suffer from unfulfilled desire … full or terrors and alarms.”3

Book IX is, in several respects, the most uninteresting part of The Republic, and so I will make only brief commentary. The conclusion that it fleshes out follows neatly enough from what has come before.

The Same Method of Analogy with Tyranny

How will this treatment of the tyrannical man help us in the original inquiry? It will do so because, remember, Thrasymachus exulted in the “perfect injustice" of such a man which Socrates has now perfectly sculpted as the tyrant. Recall that the question was twofold: what justice is in itself and in what state it made the man: either happy or miserable.

Socrates recalls their prior discussion about “unnecessary appetites" as opposed to the necessary. Of the unnecessary desires, “there are some lawless ones, I think, which probably are to be found in us all, but which, when controlled by the laws and the better desires in alliance with reason, can in some men be altogether gotten rid of, or so nearly so that only a few weak ones remain, while in others the remnant is stronger and more numerous.”4‍ ‍

Leaving aside his naiveté about indwelling sin, of which he has no categories, nevertheless the civil use of the law entails such a promotion of good that the modern maxim “You can’t legislate morality” turns out to be far more naive than Socrates’s hopes at eliminating evil. While internal reform cannot be legislated, yet morality can. Since internal sin is spurred on by external examples, enticements, or enforcements (threats against virtuous behavior), then a law which banishes such external aggravants directs the soul toward the good and “allies with reason,” to use Socrates’s expression.

If anyone is qualified to judge our question, such a one must have lived, as if under the same roof, with the tyrant, to give us a sense of his long-term temperament.5 Since this cannot be done, he reminds us,

Recall the general likeness between the city and the man … you see in [a tyranny] masters and free men … If, then … the man resembles the state, must not the same proportion obtain in him, and his soul teem with boundless servility and illiberality, the best and most reasonable parts of it being enslaved, while a small part, and the worst and the most frenzied, plays the despot? 6

The apologist for the tyrant may object that he does not accept the premise about reason being the most excellent faculty, or wisdom being the most excellent prize.

A Psychology and Sociology of the Tyrannical Man

Why is the tyrant over a city most miserable of tyrannical personalities? “Perhaps you will regard the one I am about to name as still more wretched … The one who, said I, being of tyrannical temper, does not live out his life in private station but is so unfortunate that by some unhappy chance he is enabled to become an actual tyrant.”7 But why unhappy? Perhaps his increased opportunity for power will eliminate all obstacles to happiness—so he deludes himself. Leaders of state are no superheroes. They are not gods. They have no such other-worldly power to make people do as they please. Their power is a series of bargains. Considering that none serve him out of love, and that, in turn, he must bribe and threaten.

Then it is the truth ... that the real tyrant is really enslaved to cringings and servitudes beyond compare, a flatterer of the basest men, and that, so far finding even the least satisfaction for his desires, he is in need of most things, and is a poor man in very truth, as is apparent if one knows how to observe a soul in its entirety.8

The three parts of the soul and its pleasures must be reviewed. With one part man learns, with the second he feels, and with the third he has intense appetites. The third is linked to the love of food, bodily pleasure, and money. The second is linked to the love of victory and reputation. The first, which should be chief, is linked to knowledge and wisdom.9 “And that is why we say that the primary classes of men also are three, the philosopher or lover of wisdom, the lover of victory, and the lover of gain.”10

More generally, “corresponding to the three types in the city, the soul also is tripartite … The three parts have also, it appears to me, three kinds of pleasure, one particular to each, and similarly three appetites and controls.”11 All of this is meant to serve the second part of the original question. If the tyrant can only be so by enslaving one part to another—the greater to the lesser—then Thrasymachus could not have been more incorrect. If wisdom rules, then the love which loves victory will not be over each other but for the whole, and that which is gained will not cause the whole to descend to the level of animals.

A Metaphysical Account of Pleasure for the Win

The question is asked as to which of the lovers—that is, which of the three types of men governed by one of the three loves—has a greater experience of the other two objects of love. This may seem an obscure question at first. But let us consider the answer Socrates gives. The “philosopher, must needs taste of the other two kinds of pleasure from childhood, but the lover of gain is not only under no necessity of tasting or experiencing the sweetness of the pleasure of learning the true natures of things, but he cannot easily do so even if he desires and is eager for it. The lover of wisdom, then, said I, far surpasses the lover of gain in experience of both kinds of pleasure.” Likewise with the experience of honor. Not only will the lover of wisdom have the most experience of the whole, but will have experiences each with actual knowledge, so that “he is the best judge of the three.”12

To judge by that which is more real is to make that judgment most true. It also corresponds to the three basic classes of society in their original construction: the true rulers having a desire for wisdom, the auxiliaries having a desire for honor, and the laborers and craftsmen having the desire for bodily pleasure. The last can even be fitting, so long as there is that harmony of the soul (or body politic) that maintains the rule of the higher over the lower.

The same rationale is behind the next seemingly abrupt question about pleasure and pain. At first, they assume that pain and pleasure are mere opposites, and that the ceasing of one or the other is a kind of “intermediate state” or quietude from either. Then Socrates reminds them that when men suffer pain, “freedom from pain and relief from it [is] the highest pleasure” and that, “when a man’s delight comes to an end, the cessation of pleasure will be painful.” What follows? It is that what “we just now described as the intermediate state between the two—this quietude—will sometimes be both pain and pleasure.”13 The initial problem is that “that which is neither become both.”

He uses the word “illusion” for this,14 but then explains that these are in juxtaposition to either the pleasure or the pain in the proper sense. It would be better to say they are relations, or it is a manner of speaking. He then directs us to pleasures that have neither antecedent pain nor consequent pain. Viewing plainness as pleasure “in its relation to pain” is like never having been exposed to white and comparing grey to black.15 By this point, the reader who is well-versed in Plato’s views of the forms and knowledge may see where this is headed. The crucial passage is here:

In this way, then, consider it. Are not hunger and thirst and similar states inanitions or emptiness of the bodily habit? … And is not ignorance and folly in turn a kind of emptiness of the habit of the soul? … And he who partakes of nourishment and he who gets wisdom fills the void and is filled? … And which is the truer filling and fulfillment, that of the less or of the more real being?16

On a common sense level, there is something rather deficient about a “happiness” that does not terminate on the, well, in-terminable. If the lover can lose the beloved, or if the lover can ever have love spoiled—in short, if the fountainhead of which all previous sips of joy is not both never-ending and ever-increasing, then there is some greater pleasure still. Whether Plato could make this last leap is immaterial to that fact; but, as to the exact train of his argument, there is nothing subjective about this exaltation of virtues of the soul as the explanation of the truer reality of pleasure. This is the key to the irrationality of objections to the Christian God on the various grounds of some better end, some notion of love or other human fulfillments. It is not merely that we are not the sort of being who are competent to judge our true end. It is also that what we can see of true ends all empty out in a set of attributes that can only be descriptions of the Christian God.

Socrates concludes:

If, then, to be filled with what befits nature is pleasure, then that which is more really filled with real things would more really and truly cause us to enjoy a true pleasure, while that which partakes of the less truly existent would be less truly and surely filled and would partake of a less trustworthy and less true pleasure.17

The role of philosophy that Socrates would cast here is valuable to reorient ourselves to argument at its close. He asks, “And would not that which is furthest removed from philosophy and reason be most likely to produce this effect?” [that of pursuing alien pleasures] “And is not that furthest removed from reason which is furthest from law and order? … And was it not made plain that the furthest removed are the erotic and tyrannical appetites?”18 This is the clincher against Thrasymachus.

Then the tyrant’s place … will be fixed at the furthest remove from true and proper pleasure, and the king’s at the least … Then the tyrant’s life will be least pleasurable and the king’s most.19

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1. Republic, IX:571b, 573b

2. Republic, IX:577a

3. Republic, IX:578a

4. Republic, IX:571b

5. Republic, IX:577a-b

6. Republic, IX:577c, d

7. Republic, IX:578b-c

8. Republic, IX:579d-e

9. Republic, IX:580d-581b

10. Republic, IX:581c

11. Republic, IX:580d

12. Republic, IX:582b-d

13. Republic, IX:583d, e

14. Republic, IX:IX:584a

15. Republic, IX:585a

16. Republic, IX:585a-b

17. Republic, IX:585e

18. Republic, IX:587a-b

19. Republic, IX:587b