Plato’s Republic is one of those books that most people have probably heard of, even if they have not actually read it. Even Bubbles, the good-hearted, bespectacled doofus of the long-running Canadian comedy Trailer Park Boys knows enough of the Republic to appeal to the famous Noble Lie in a conversation with another resident of Sunnyvale Trailer Park.

I first encountered the Republic like so many others have: in my first semester of college. This was many years ago, but my memory of the experience was one of feeling lost much of the time. I had a fine high school education, but philosophy was new to me, with its focus on big, abstract questions and especially on rigorous, rational arguments as the means to answering them. I did reasonably well in the course, but the Republic was tricky terrain, and I did not really know my way about. My aim in this book is to help readers traverse Plato’s philosophical masterpiece with fewer falls and less befuddled wandering than I experienced. I try to do this by pointing out important landmarks and interesting bits of topography, helping readers not to miss the forest for the trees, as the saying goes, but also to appreciate the importance of particular trees, hills, and streams. I consider objections to the views and arguments Plato has Socrates express and make. Thinking philosophically requires, among other things, stating arguments clearly and carefully, articulating assumptions that lurk in the background, and making judgments—hopefully, good judgments—about whether the reasons offered in support of a claim are good reasons.

The Republic’s Two Main Questions

The Republic addresses two overarching questions, What is justice? and Is a just life happier—more profitable or personally advantageous—than an unjust life? Plato addresses these questions in what is for modern readers an unexpected way: in dialogue form. Instead of writing an essay or a treatise directly arguing for his view, he gives us a philosophical drama, so to speak, a conversation between Socrates and several others in which answers are offered, discussed, and typically rejected. Plato wrote almost all of his philosophy as dialogues, most of them featuring Socrates talking with someone he would encounter in Athens (though Plato’s later dialogues no longer feature Socrates). Plato was not Socrates’ student in a formal sense, since Socrates himself wrote nothing and started no school—unlike Plato, who founded the Academy, where Aristotle studied before founding his own school, the Lyceum. But like many young men of his day, Plato was taken with Socrates, struck by his sharp and open mind and his fearless but often failed pursuit of knowledge. Whether the views the character Socrates expresses in the Republic are his own or whether Plato uses him to express his own views is an interesting issue, but it is not one that we need worry over to come to terms with the Republic. I will usually make no distinction between Plato and Socrates in this book, except when doing so helps our understanding, as when, for example, Socrates seems to make an error in reasoning or allows a crucial assumption to pass unquestioned. Is the mistake one that Plato himself does not recognize? Or does he intentionally have Socrates stumble or ‘pull a fast one’ because this is what actually happened in the conversation, of which the dialogue is a faithful but stylized representation? Or—more likely, I think—because he wants us, his readers, to engage in imaginary dialogue with Socrates, to raise objections and questions where the other characters are silent or too agreeable? That Plato writes philosophy in dialogue-form complicates the life of the reader, but it is a complication that is rich and rewarding, and also enables Plato to manifest respect for his readers. His aim is not the transmission of truth or doctrine from the knowing sage to a passive but receptive learner—indeed, in presenting the famous Allegory of the Cave he explicitly rejects the idea that education is ‘putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes’ (7.518b).^[1] Instead, we are expected to be active, engaged readers who wrestle with the questions and arguments for ourselves. Writing dialogues suggests that philosophy—which I take to be clear, rigorous thinking about those important questions that are outside the ambit of the natural or social sciences—is best done in conversation with others rather than alone in one’s study.

Readers with some familiarity with philosophy will not be surprised that one of our first tasks in trying to understand how Plato has Socrates answer the Republic’s two main questions is to question the questions themselves. What exactly does Plato mean when he asks about the nature of justice and whether it is ‘more profitable’ than injustice? An important point straightaway is that δικαιοσύνη (dikaiosunê), which is translated as ‘justice’, can have broader meaning than the English word ‘justice’ has, which typically involves fair distributions or the idea of rights. Dikaiosunê certainly has this narrower sense too; in Book V of his Nicomachean Ethics, Plato’s student Aristotle distinguishes between specific and general senses of justice, where specific justice concerns what today we would call distributive justice (which asks whether a particular distribution of goods is fair) and retributive justice (which asks if and how wrongdoers should be punished). The broader sense that Plato has in mind connotes moral goodness more generally, a virtue of ‘doing the right thing’ (though we will ultimately see that for Plato justice is primarily about being a certain sort of person rather than doing certain kinds of things). Justice in this broad sense might be rendered by ‘righteousness’, but that seems rather archaic and can have misleading religious connotations. Aristotle suggests that justice in this general sense is ‘complete virtue’, the whole of virtue, of which the narrower kind of justice is a part.^[2] When Socrates asks what justice is, he is asking about the nature of moral goodness generally, asking what is it to be a good person.

The Republic’s second question asks whether being a good person makes one personally better off—whether it ‘would make living most worthwhile for each of us’ (1.344e). There is no question of whether a just life is a morally better than an unjust life; the issue the second question raises, by contrast, is whether a just life is prudentially better, as philosophers often put it—whether it is in one’s interest to be just and act justly. This question has great practical importance, given the overwhelmingly plausible assumption that each of us wants to be happy. As Socrates puts it, ‘the argument concerns no ordinary topic but the way we ought to live’ (1.352d). In ordinary English there is a subtle distinction between leading a good life and having a good life. At the funeral of a friend who was devoted to the wellbeing of others we expect the eulogy to focus on the former: they led a good life, helping others without thought of self and often to their own detriment. At the funeral of a friend devoted to the pleasures of the table and the bedroom we are likelier to hear that they had a good life. So the Republic’s second question inquires about the connection between leading a good life and having a good life. It is a comparative question, asking if the just person is happier than the unjust person. Socrates is not arguing that justice is sufficient for happiness, that being just alone makes for a happy life. Instead, he will argue that justice is necessary for happiness, that we cannot be happy without being just. Socrates thinks that justice alone will not guarantee happiness, since there may be external circumstances that make happiness impossible, even for the just person. But the just or morally good person will be as happy as it is possible to be in those circumstances and always be happier than the unjust person, since justice always makes one better off than injustice, he thinks. As we follow along, it will be helpful to bear in mind ways in which ‘happiness’ can be a misleading translation for the Greek word εὐδαιμονία (eudaimonia), which connotes flourishing or thriving, something deeper and longer lasting than the perhaps fleeting psychological state of enjoyment that we might associate with our word ‘happiness’. A flourishing person will typically enjoy their life, but the enjoyment is best thought of as a by-product of happiness rather than its essence.

The Structure of the Republic

The Republic’s two main questions give it its structure, which I sketch here:

Book I introduces but ultimately fails to answer the Republic’s two main questions. Socrates discusses the nature and value of justice first with Cephalus and Polemarchus and then with Thrasymachus, a more sophisticated and less friendly interlocutor. Socrates initially thinks that he has refuted Thrasymachus’ view that the unjust life is happier than the just life, but he soon realizes that he has left the Republic’s first question unanswered and thus that he has not really answered the second question; how could he know which life is happier if he does not yet know what justice is?

Books II–IV answer the Republic’s first question, ‘What is justice?’. Socrates’ young friends Glaucon and Adeimantus (who in real life are Plato’s brothers) challenge Socrates to continue after the failure of Book I. They agree with him that the just life is happier than the unjust life, but they recognize that they cannot justify their view and thus do not really know that the just life is more profitable. They press Socrates to forgo the rapid-fire argumentation of Book I and to offer a more intuitive, accessible way of answering the Republic’s questions. Although these questions concern justice as a virtue of persons (which we’ll call personal justice), Socrates suggests that, since a polis (a Greek city-state) is just like a person, only bigger, the best way to figure out the nature of personal justice is to investigate justice in the polis (political justice) since it will be easier to find justice in the larger thing. Thus they set out to theoretically construct an ideal polis, which is completed by the end of Book III. And by the end of Book IV, Socrates thinks he has answered the first question and starts on the second.

In Books V–VII, Socrates answers questions about and objections to his answer to the Republic’s first question. These are dubbed ‘the Three Waves’, since they threaten to destroy the ideal city. The First Wave concerns whether women can be rulers in the ideal polis. Socrates’ view on this might surprise you. The second addresses the ideal city’s communal life, especially how children are to be raised—which seems to do away with the traditional family. The third and most threatening concerns the ideal polis itself: is their ideal city merely theoretical, or could it be realized in the actual world? Socrates thinks such a city can be realized only if it is ruled by philosophers, which leads to an investigation of what a philosopher is. This investigation will last through Book VII. In addressing the Third Wave, Plato has Socrates introduce the famous theory of the Forms and offer one of the Republic’s central arguments, the Powers Argument, in defense of this view; he presents the analogies of the Sun and the Divided Line in Book VI, and the famous Allegory of the Cave in Book VII, among other things.

Having addressed the Three Waves to the company’s satisfaction, in Books VIII-IX Socrates turns to the Republic’s second question, ‘Is the just life happier than the unjust life?’. Expanding on the psychology and political philosophy developed earlier, he distinguishes between five possible kinds of souls and city-states and argues that the just life is happier than the unjust life.

Having answered the Republic’s two questions, in Book X Socrates returns to the status of poetry, which featured prominently in the educational program sketched in Books II and III. Despite his love for poetry, especially the works of Homer, he argues that most poetry should not be allowed in the ideal city because of its power to corrupt us. He concludes with the intriguing Myth of Er, about the importance of choice in a happy, well-lived life.

Readers will often find it helpful to keep the Republic’s overall structure in mind while making their way through the text, since what a character is talking about often makes more sense when we understand why they are talking about it. So it can be helpful, when feeling a little lost, to orient oneself by asking which question of the Republic’s two main questions is being addressed—although it might take a bit of intellectual sleuthing to determine that. For example, the details of the educational program Socrates develops in Books II and III are interesting in their own right, but it is easy to lose sight of why he devotes so much time and intellectual energy to this topic. If we keep the Republic’s overall structure in mind, we can see that Socrates discusses education and culture because he is exploring what an ideal polis is like, which requires an understanding of how the polis’s rulers will be educated. And of course, he wants to create this ideal polis because the plan is to define political justice in order to define personal justice. And while the Republic’s first question about the nature of personal justice is interesting in its own right, Socrates wants to answer it because, as he realizes at the end of Book I, we cannot satisfactorily answer the Republic’s second question about whether the just life is happier until we know what justice is.

As orienting oneself by overall structure is an aid to understanding, I will try to offer signposts and reminders as we proceed through the Republic. Shortly I will offer more detail about what individual chapters of this book will contain, but before doing that I want to draw the reader’s attention to one more big-picture topic.

Arguing about Justice

Thrasymachus, Socrates’ main antagonist in the second half of Book I, thinks that justice and happiness are at odds with each other, that being just and acting justly leave one worse off. Socrates disagrees, and it is instructive to see what he does and does not do in the face of this disagreement. First, what he does not do: he does not insult Thrasymachus or impugn his intelligence or his motives. Sadly, the same cannot be said for Thrasymachus, who responds to Socrates’ arguments in a rather nasty way. Nor does Socrates shrug and say things like, ‘Everyone’s got a right to their opinion, I guess’ or ‘Who’s to say?’ or ‘That’s just your opinion, man’, like a Lebowski of classical antiquity who has traded his bathrobe for a chiton (the ancient Greeks did not wear togas; that was a Roman thing). Socrates does not think that reason merely sheds light on the Republic’s main questions, he thinks it can answer them. Some readers will be less confident in the power of rational argument and conceptual clarity; they may be more comfortable than Socrates and Plato are with there being more than one correct answer to these questions—or with there being none. But even though Socrates himself is not a moral pluralist, it is important to see that the method he employs in arguing against Thrasymachus is consistent with there being a plurality of answers to moral questions of the sort that the Republic devotes itself to. For while Socrates’ method of question-and-answer—formally called elenchus, a kind of cross-examination—is impersonal in the sense of focusing on principles rather than personalities, it is in another sense profoundly personal, for its focus is what the person he is engaging with thinks. The best way to investigate the nature of justice, he thinks, is to critically examine the views of someone who claims to know what justice is, to see if such a view can survive rigorous cross-examination and coherently hang together. So he proceeds from premises that his interlocutors endorse. Although Socrates thinks that there is an Archimedean point from which one can definitively settle moral questions, the Socratic method of question-and-answer does not presuppose this exalted view of reason. Its aim is more modest: to discover whether one’s philosophical and moral beliefs are internally consistent. While this method is no respecter of persons in that it does not defer to someone based upon their social class, etc., it is, I think, profoundly respectful of persons, since it takes seriously a person’s moral and philosophical views. Even though these views are usually found wanting, a willingness to examine a person’s views about the nature of justice or courage or knowledge or whatever is certainly a way of taking those views, and that person, seriously.

What to Expect in this Book

This book is not a line-by-line commentary of the Republic, but it hews closely to the main contours of the Republic. I intend it as an aid to reading the Republic rather than as a substitute for doing so. In the chapters to come I try to guide readers, especially those new to the Republic or returning to it after a long absence, to a clear understanding of the Republic’s main themes and distinctive arguments. But we will also pause to linger over details that are interesting in themselves and which contribute to a nuanced understanding of Plato’s philosophical thought and literary artistry. I will try to clearly and accurately spell out the arguments Plato has Socrates offer and then critically reflect on them, asking questions such as ‘Does the conclusion logically follow from the premises?’ and ‘Do we have good reasons to think the premises are true?’ and ‘What assumptions are driving the argument?’, etc. We will see that Socrates’ interlocutors often accept arguments that they have good reason to doubt. This is something most of us do, especially when we think the conclusion is true, but setting aside one’s belief in a conclusion and querying the quality of the reasons offered in support of it is the hallmark of good critical thinking. I will try to model that in the pages to come and hopefully help readers sharpen their own philosophical skills. Since one of Plato’s aims is for us, his readers, to think philosophically for ourselves, nothing would delight me more than readers disagreeing with and arguing against claims, interpretations, and assessments I make. Needless to say, there is a lot I will leave out as we proceed through the Republic, but by the end readers should have a good sense of the main themes and arguments of the Republic and of some of the philosophical problems with them. Here is a chapter-by-chapter rundown of the main issues to be discussed.

Chapter One, ‘Fathers and Sons’, covers the first half of Book I of the Republic, where Socrates raises the Republic’s first question about the nature of justice at the home of Cephalus, a wealthy merchant who lives in a suburb of Athens. Cephalus suggests that justice is paying one’s debts and telling the truth, but Socrates thinks this cannot be the essence of justice, since there are times when one should not return what one has borrowed. This alerts us to an important fact about what Socrates is looking for in an account of justice: the account should be unconditionally correct, with no ifs, ands, or buts. Cephalus’ son Polemarchus jumps into the conversation and offers a revision of his father’s definition, suggesting that justice—right conduct, generally—is benefiting one’s friends and harming one’s enemies. Socrates finds this account has implications that Polemarchus himself cannot accept, so the chapter explores Socrates’ reasoning, especially the assumption that justice, a virtue of character, is a craft or skill. We then discuss Socrates’ more direct argument against Polemarchus’ account, that the just person would not harm anyone.

Chapter Two, ‘Taming the Beast: Socrates versus Thrasymachus’, is devoted to Socrates’ encounter with the sophist Thrasymachus in the second half of Book I. Thrasymachus’ answers to the Republic’s main questions are a provocative challenge to the reverential attitude Socrates has toward justice in particular and virtue in general. Thrasymachus defines justice as whatever benefits the politically powerful and argues that a conventionally just person lives less happily than their unjust counterpart. Socrates offers five different arguments against Thrasymachus’ views, which are spelled out clearly and evaluated carefully, with attention paid to the connections between them and to the crucial concepts around which they orbit (e.g., the notion of a virtue). Socrates’ arguments fall short of the mark, and we will examine why this is the case, exploring avenues of response that Thrasymachus could but does not take. By the close of Book I, Socrates realizes that he has not answered the Republic’s second question because he has not yet answered the first: we cannot know whether the just life is happier until we first know what justice is.

Chapter Three, ‘A Fresh Start’, explores the way in which Socrates tries to address the Republic’s two questions, ‘What is justice?’ and ‘Is the just life happier than the unjust life?’. Rather than offering a battery of arguments as he did in Book I, Socrates offers an analogy between the polis (the Greek city-state) and the psychê (individual soul) that will structure the rest of the Republic. The plan is to first discover the nature of justice as a political virtue—as a virtue of the polis—and then apply this to the individual soul in order to discover the nature of personal justice.

Chapter Four, ‘Blueprints for a Platonic Utopia: Education and Culture’, examines Socrates’ account of education in the ideal polis, focusing especially on informal, cultural education in music and poetry. We will explore the fascinating connections Socrates draws between aesthetic and moral development, especially the role that poetic and musical style play over and above content. We then discuss Socrates’ rather disturbing attitude toward disabled citizens before focusing on the famous Noble Falsehood, which concludes Book III, discussing the role that myth, especially myths of origin, play in civic self-understanding.

Chapter Five, ‘Starting to Answer the First Question: The Political Virtues’, focuses on the first third of Book IV. The ideal polis complete, Socrates and company investigate the political virtues of wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice, defining each and discussing their location in the polis. We will explore these accounts and the issues they raise, for example how the kind of agreement that constitutes political moderation differs from the idea of consent in modern liberal political thought, and the question of whether there are other virtues in addition to the four cardinal virtues.

We continue discussing Book IV of the Republic in Chapter Six, ‘The Republic’s First Question Answered at Last: Personal Justice’. We first attend to Plato’s foray into psychology (literally, his account (logos) of the soul (psuchê)) in which he tries to justify the analogy between city and soul that has shaped the Republic. By appealing to the idea that the same thing cannot simultaneously undergo or perform opposite states or activities (dubbed the Opposition Principle), Socrates argues that the soul has a three-part structure, just as the city does: a rational part, which corresponds to the guardian-rulers in the polis; a spirited part (the seat of anger and pride), which corresponds to the soldierly auxiliaries of the polis; and an appetitive part, which corresponds to the craftspeople. Socrates then derives the personal virtues by applying the political virtues to the soul. The most important personal virtue, of course, is justice, which he conceives of as each part of the soul doing its own work: reason, not appetite or spirit, governs the just soul. We will pay attention to important features of this account, for example how it differs from Cephalus’ and Polemarchus’, for whom justice is a matter of interpersonal, external doing (of how one treats one’s fellows), while for Socrates and Plato is it a matter of intrapersonal, internal being, of what one’s soul is like.

In Chapter Seven, ‘Questions about the Ideal Polis: The Three Waves’, we see Polemarchus and Adeimantus begin Book V by putting the brakes on Socrates’ attempt to immediately begin answering the Republic’s second question, whether living a morally good life is good for the person living it. They raise questions about and objections to the ideal polis, known as ‘the Three Waves’, which is an apt metaphor for a sea-faring culture. The First Wave concerns the question of whether women can be guardian-rulers in the ideal city. Socrates’ affirmative answer—surprising to his companions and to many readers alike (though for different reasons)—raises the question of whether Plato is a feminist. The Second Wave concerns the ideal city’s communal living arrangements, especially child-rearing. Socrates argues that not only is the abolition of the traditional family possible, it is beneficial. The Third Wave is the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter Eight, ‘Surfing the Third Wave: Plato’s Metaphysical Elevator, the Powers Argument, and the Infallibility of Knowledge’, focuses on the Third Wave, which concerns the very possibility of the ideal city. Socrates famously claims that the ideal city can be made real only if philosophers rule. This leads him to explore how philosophers differ from non-philosophers, which will guide the last part of Book V as well as Books VI and VII. A crucial point of difference is that philosophers have knowledge while non-philosophers merely have belief, a distinction which is explored in some depth and detail. We devote special attention to one of the Republic’s most crucial arguments, the Powers Argument, in which Socrates argues for the existence of the Forms, the mind-independently real, timeless essences of the many particular things that populate the everyday world of our senses. The reality of the Forms is perhaps Plato’s most distinctive metaphysical view, so we devote quite a bit of attention to stating, explaining, and evaluating the Powers Argument, and to discussing the implications of its being seriously flawed.

Chapter Nine, ‘The Philosopher’s Virtues’, continues to explore the distinction between philosophers and non-philosophers, focusing on their different characters. Central to the discussion is the distinction between virtues of character (for example, justice), intellectual virtues (for example, a good memory), and virtues of personal style (for example, grace and elegance), attending to the light this last category sheds on Plato’s moral vision. As a prelude to the key analogies of Book VI, the rest of this chapter is devoted to the interesting analogies Socrates appeals to in addressing features of the Third Wave.

Chapter Ten, ‘Metaphors to Think By: The Sun and Divided Line Analogies’, is devoted to the marquee analogies of Book VI, both of which address the Third Wave by developing the distinction between the sensible world of concrete particular things and the intelligible world of the Forms. Having suggested that the Form of the good is even more important than justice, Socrates cannot or will not say what the good is, but he does say what he thinks it is like: the good plays the same role in the intelligible world as the sun plays in the visible world. In the Analogy of the Divided Line, Socrates further develops the distinction between belief, which is appropriate to the sensible, visible world, and knowledge, which is appropriate to the intelligible world of the Forms. By exploring the role that hypotheses play in reasoning, he distinguishes philosophical knowledge from mathematical knowledge, somewhat surprisingly taking the former to be more rigorous.

True to its name, Chapter Eleven, ‘Shedding Light on the Allegory of the Cave’, devotes itself to exploring the famous Allegory of the Cave from Book VII of the Republic, carefully considering its various stages and themes before examining the issue posed by the enlightened philosopher’s return to the Cave. As Socrates describes it, the enlightened philosopher descends back into the Cave not because they want to, but because they recognize that justice requires them to do so. This raises an issue for discussion that Socrates does not seem to notice: the enlightened philosopher would be happier if they ignored the demands of justice and remained in the intelligible world of the Forms, which suggests that, contrary to Socrates’ view, the just life is not happier than the unjust life.

In Chapter Twelve, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Ideal City-Soul’, we begin exploring Socrates’ answer to the Republic’s second question. In Books VIII and IX, Socrates sketches five kinds of cities and souls, noting what each takes as its primary end or goal and which part or class governs the soul and city, respectively. We trace the decay from the best city-soul to the worst, attending to the role that changes to education play and to interesting features of each stage, and discuss at some length Plato’s distinction between necessary and unnecessary desires.

Chapter Thirteen, ‘The Republic’s Second Question Answered: Three and a Half Arguments that the Just Life is Happier’, explores the arguments Socrates gives in Book IX that the just life is happier—indeed, 729 times happier—than the unjust life. There are fascinating features of the first two arguments, for example that the tyrannical person is incapable of friendship and that each part of the soul has a distinctive kind of pleasure. The third argument, the Metaphysics of Pleasure Argument, argues that since what is more filling is more pleasant and what is more real is more filling, the Forms, being the most real things, ground the most pleasant pleasures. We discuss this argument at some length, noting its dependence on the Powers Argument but also exploring ways in which Socrates seems to anticipate and preemptively respond to objections. In the last argument, which Socrates does not identify as such (hence the ‘half’), is a metaphorical argument which, despite its being less philosophically rigorous than the Metaphysics of Pleasure Argument, is more intuitively persuasive and in no way relies on the problematic Powers Argument. This chapter concludes with a discussion of Plato’s paternalism: his view that most of us, being incapable of the philosophical wisdom that consists of knowledge of the good, are incapable of good self-governance, so we are all better off being governed by someone else’s (i.e., a philosopher-king’s or -queen’s) reason.

Chapter Fourteen, ‘Are We There Yet? Tying up Loose Ends in Book X’, explores the three topics of the Republic’s final book, Book X. The first is the status of poetry, which Socrates wants to revisit since he now has a psychology (the three-part soul) that he lacked when poetry was first discussed. He concludes, quite reluctantly, that very little poetry will be allowed in the ideal city, mainly because of its power to corrupt us: we give ourselves over to emotion and thus dethrone reason from its rightful place. After exploring his arguments for this view, we turn to his argument for the immortality of the soul, which Socrates offers in the context of showing the external advantages of living a just life (namely, having a reputation for justice), which were set aside to answer Glaucon’s and Adeimantus’ challenge of showing that justice was intrinsically good—that all by itself it made its possessor better off. Lastly, we attend to the Myth of Er, with which the Republic ends. Er’s story is an allegory about the importance of careful choice in living justly and thus happily. It is a fascinating way to end the Republic, in terms of both content and style; we briefly explore what philosophical points Plato might be making by ending a work of philosophy this way.

Needless to say, I have not mentioned everything we will discuss, but this should give readers a good sense of the main contours of the Republic and a decent idea of what is to come. Now, on to the Republic!

Starting to Answer the First Question: The Political Virtues, Book IV

In Book IV Socrates answers the Republic’s first question, What is justice? Keeping to the plan devised in Book II, he first tells us what political justice—justice in the polis or city-state—is and then, arguing that the ideal polis and the human soul (psuchê) share the same three-part structure, he applies his definition of political justice to the psyche, arriving at his definition of personal justice. His definition is interesting in many ways, not least of which is its accounting for justice not as a matter of outward behavior, as Cephalus’ and Polemarchus’ definitions did, but rather as an inward matter of psychic harmony.

Happiness: Parts and Wholes, Individuals and Communities (4.419a–421c)

Book IV begins with Adeimantus jumping back into the conversation with a concern that brings to the fore the tension between individualism and communitarianism. He worries that the guardians and auxiliaries will not be especially happy, given the lifestyles Socrates described at the close of Book III: communal living, no privacy, not much money, etc. ‘The city really belongs to them’, Adeimantus says, ‘yet they derive no good from it’ since they lack ‘the things that are thought to belong to people who are blessedly happy’ (4.419a). This is certainly a plausible view about what the best kind of life is like. The Greek verb translated as ‘thought’ is νομίζεται (nomizetai), which is cognate with νόμος (nomos: custom or law), and thus indicates what is thought or deemed or customarily taken to be the best life—not necessarily what actually is the best life.

Plato has Socrates give a twofold response to Adeimantus. First, he suggests that far from being unhappy, the guardians may well be the happiest group in the ideal polis. They are performing the task or function for which they are best suited, after all, and if they are performing it well, they are probably delighting in it. It is another reminder that while the good of the community is Socrates’ primary concern, it is not his only concern. Socrates then reminds Adeimantus of the plan they have adopted, to investigate the nature of personal justice and its connection to personal happiness by discovering the nature of political justice and its connection to happiness. His focus, then, is on political happiness, on ‘making the whole city happy’ (4.420c); he does not aim to make ‘any one group outstandingly happy, but to make the whole city so’ (4.420b). Even though he seems to be doubling down on the holistic or communitarian ethos that is regularly contrasted with the individualism which many readers will find intuitively more attractive, his communitarianism here is largely methodological, a useful device to get to his ultimate concern, which is individual happiness. In Book V he will suggest that individual wellbeing depends in no small way on whether the polis one lives in is just, which suggests a more modest community-first ethos than he has been espousing heretofore.

The Ideal City: Finishing Touches (4.421c–427d)

After giving a warning about the damage economic inequality can wreak in a city—a theme to which he will return in Book VIII—Socrates reminds Adeimantus of the importance of the guardians’ preserving the educational system as they have received it, lest it be corrupted by seemingly minor and innocuous changes.

Many readers will have witnessed versions of such cultural conservatism in their lifetimes, for example, panicked responses to the threats posed by jazz, Elvis, the Beatles, and rap music. But lest Plato seem like just another cranky old fuddy-duddy bemoaning music he did not grow up with, we should remember that the ideal city’s music was chosen intentionally and with great care, since it is meant to cultivate traits of character necessary to the city’s thriving. The worry is that ‘lawlessness easily creeps in […] unnoticed’ (4.424d), so, given how malleable young people are (a fact of human nature that is highly relevant to the educational system developed in Books II and III) it is important that music and culture generally provide sustenance to young souls. Children will absorb lawfulness or lawlessness—Plato mentions no neutral third option—from the games they play and the songs they sing and hear, so it is vital that the healthy system be preserved. Changes of mode and meter can seem trivial and morally neutral, but they are not, on Plato’s moral-aesthetic conception of character development. Even if we do not share Plato’s worry that ‘changing to a new form of music […] threatens the whole system’ (4.424c), keeping in mind his beliefs in the malleability of young minds and the inseparability of morality and aesthetics should render his worry at least less curmudgeonly.

Though there are several other things worth discussing in this part of Book IV, I will mention just one, what we might call Plato’s legislative minimalism. It is foolish, Socrates says, to think that legislation can overcome failures of education. Though some of his examples are trivial—regulating hairstyles and clothes—others are not: how the young treat the old and how they care for their parents, for example. This brief stretch of the Republic might seem little more than harrumphing about ‘kids today’, but Plato is doing more than mere griping here. He might not agree with the details of Ed Tom’s diagnosis in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men—‘It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight. I told her, I said: It reaches into ever strata.’^[3]—but in principle they seem to be of one mind. Communities are held together by more than rules and laws; they are held together by shared values and affections. Education in Plato’s broad sense is primarily character education, after all, and there is something to his point that legislation cannot repair defective character education. Still, we might worry that his view ignores the expressive function of law—the law’s power to say something about the shared norms and values that bind a community together. If, in addition to governing behavior, the law can also shape attitudes and beliefs, then it may have a contribution to make to character education, if only an ancillary one.

In my home state of Wisconsin, adultery is a crime—a felony, in fact. Prosecutions are extremely rare—there have been none in the last thirty years—but presumably that is not because there have been so few violations of Wisconsin Statute §944.16. I know of no empirical studies of this law’s efficacy in reducing adultery, but it seems unlikely that potential adulterers would be deterred by it, especially given its non-enforcement. But even if there is no direct causal link between criminalizing adultery and reducing extramarital adventuring, its criminalization may yet serve an important function: expressing the citizenry’s collective disapproval of adultery. If the law plays this expressive role, striking the adultery statute from the books might seem to signal, if not the community’s approval of adultery, at least its non-disapproval, and it is not implausible that this would have negative behavioral consequences, by changing attitudes and feelings about the importance of marital fidelity, promise-keeping, etc. So there may be a dimension to the law that Plato is missing here. On the other hand, a law’s remaining on the books because of its expressive function might cultivate the sort of cynicism and hypocrisy Adeimantus complains about in Book II: many citizens make a great show of the importance of the values just mentioned, because it is important to seem just, but in practice their conduct suggests a preference for being unjust.

The Political Virtues (4.427d–434d)

Now that the ideal city is complete, it is time to look for justice in it. But before we do that, I bring up a seemingly minor point that, as is so often the case with Plato, is surprisingly deep upon examination, carrying more philosophical weight than initial appearances suggest.

In announcing the completion of the ideal city, which paves the way for the inquiry into the nature of justice, Socrates says to Adeimantus, ‘your city might now be said to be established’ (4.427d). This seems innocuous enough, but up to this point, Socrates’ possessive pronoun of choice has been the first-person plural: he speaks of ‘our city’ and ‘our citizens’ (2.370d, 2.371e, 2.373b, 2.378b, 3.387e, 3.394d, 3.397d). At the corresponding point in Book II, at the completion of the first city, Socrates says, ‘Well, Adeimantus, has our city grown to completeness, then?’ (2.371e; emphasis added) Why the shift here from our city to your city? Perhaps it is merely stylistic variation on Plato’s part. After all, within just a few lines Socrates shifts back to ‘our city’ (4.427e), and then it is soon back again to ‘your city’ (4.431c). I suspect that the shift in pronouns is Plato’s way of reminding us that Socrates, despite being the chief theoretical architect of the just-completed ideal city, still regards the first city, the rustic utopia rejected by Glaucon as ‘a city for pigs’ (2.372d), as ‘the true city […] the healthy one’ (2.372e). Perhaps Plato hopes his readers will pick up on Socrates’ ambivalence and reflect further on his allegiance to his rustic utopia. That city, which has been all but forgotten by this point in the Republic, was without guardians and auxiliaries and indeed without classes of any kind. The just-completed city is not only structured by political classes but in fact, we will soon see, has the same structure as the human soul. This is a perfect place to remind attentive readers of the second-best nature of the ideal city, if only to make us think through how seriously to take Socrates’ attitude toward it.

So what seems a matter of mere style may turn out to be really a matter of substance, though we will not pursue so fine a point any further. Hopefully, though, this brief discussion reminds us of what a subtle work the Republic is and why it rewards repeated rereading.

Cardinal Virtues

If the city is well founded, Socrates argues, it will be ‘completely good’ (4.427e) and thus it will not be missing any of the moral virtues. For Socrates and Plato, there are four primary virtues: courage, moderation, wisdom and justice. Aristotle had a much longer list, including friendliness, wit, generosity, and proper pride, among others. Philosophers often speak of Plato’s four virtues as ‘the cardinal virtues’, which suggests at a minimum that the virtues are important or paramount. But in another, stronger sense, to call a virtue a cardinal virtue is to say that it is theoretically basic: there are no virtues more basic than it and any non-cardinal virtue is somehow reducible to or a version of the cardinal virtue in question. Socrates says that ‘there are four virtues’ (4.428a) and that together they make the city ‘completely good’ (4.427e), which suggests that these virtues are cardinal in the stronger, theoretically basic sense. To see what is at stake here, consider the attention paid earlier in the Republic to cultivating the virtue of piety by regulating stories about the gods—and consider Plato’s having devoted an entire dialogue (the Euthyphro) to investigating the nature of piety. If piety is not a cardinal virtue, perhaps it can be subsumed under justice, since piety concerns what is owed to the gods and justice is plausibly thought of as giving to each what they are owed. Viewing piety as a requirement or form of justice would preserve the cardinality of Socrates’ four virtues. One problem with this view, however, is that in Book I Socrates casts doubt on defining justice in terms of what is owed, and we will soon see that the definition of justice Socrates proposes is not couched in terms of giving to each what they are owed. Another, related, worry is that what goes for piety can also go for the other virtues. If courage, for example, can be thought of as what soldiers owe the city, then like piety courage is not itself a distinct virtue but instead a kind of justice. So by seeking to preserve the cardinality of the four cardinal virtues we end up destroying their cardinality.

This concern about piety is in a sense internal to Plato’s moral thinking and to the account of virtue he is offering here: he seems committed to piety’s being a genuine, stand-alone virtue and yet he excludes it from his ‘official’ list. A different kind of concern is external: when looking at Plato’s list we might think he is excluding some traits we take to be virtues. Many readers will think of kindness and generosity, for example, as virtues of character, and thus think Plato’s list is mistaken not because of an internal inconsistency or tension but because it fails to include traits that belong on the list. When thinking about the attitudes Socrates expresses toward the disabled in Book III, many readers will think that the virtue of compassion is in short supply in his ideal city. It would be difficult to subsume generosity under justice, since generosity is at least in part a matter of giving which goes beyond what is owed.

Yet another worry concerns the argument Socrates gives for the complete goodness of the ideal city:

Premise #1 (P1) If our city has been correctly founded, it is completely good. (4.427e)

Premise #2 (P2) Our city has been correctly founded.

Conclusion (C) Therefore, our city is completely good.

While we might question why correctness must imply completeness, P1 seems plausible. But many readers, noting the absence of individual liberty and equal political rights in the ideal city, will have grave doubts about P2. Socrates’ more community-minded interlocutors raise no such objections, but as thoughtful readers we will want to engage in philosophical dialogue with our author by thinking through the issues for ourselves, in both senses of for ourselves. We want to think about these issues independently, not merely relying on what Plato or Socrates or whoever has to say. And we want to think about what Socrates’ claims mean to us. As he reminds his readers at various points, Socrates’ method depends upon his interlocutors’ ‘saying what [they] really think’ (1.349a). Good philosophical reading often requires adopting another’s point of view, examining whether the claims an author makes from within that point of view are consistent with it. But good philosophical reading also requires scrutinizing that point of view itself, not just for its internal consistency but also for its substantive correctness. Of course, there is a danger here of taking our own points of view as sacrosanct and beyond criticism and rejecting points of view at odds with them. But one of the values of reading a book like the Republic, which expresses perspectives very different from our own, is that they can prod us to think through our deeply-held but not always carefully, critically scrutinized beliefs.

As usual, there is more to be said here and by no means am I suggesting that Plato has no plausible responses to these worries. But in questioning the adequacy of his claim about how many virtues there are we honor him by doing the thing he most wants of us: to think philosophically and critically.

Wisdom (4.428a–429a)

The first virtue discovered in the city, wisdom (σοφία [sophia]), is the virtue of a particular class: the guardian-rulers. Wisdom is often thought of as an intellectual virtue, rather than a character virtue, as it is a kind of knowledge. Aristotle distinguished the intellectual and character virtues (although he ultimately thought that some of them were mutually dependent). While this is not a distinction Plato explicitly makes, it is a helpful one, both in itself and for the light it will shed in Book VII of the Republic, when Plato is busy distinguishing philosophers from non-philosophers.

Wisdom is a kind of knowledge, Socrates thinks, but not just any old kind of knowledge and certainly not the kind of knowledge that craftspeople possess. Nor is it the kind of abstract, theoretical knowledge a mathematician might possess. It is more general than the craftsperson’s know-how and more practical than the mathematician’s know-that. It is knowledge of what is best for the city as a whole (4.428c). Although many readers are leery of Socrates’ holism and communitarianism, here they seem unproblematic: wisdom is knowledge of what is best for the city as a whole, not what is best for any particular group of citizens. If the city is to function well, it must be unified, and it can only be unified if its rulers aim at the good of the whole, rather than at what is good for a particular part of it at the expense of the whole. Socrates has already implied that good rulers will strive to minimize economic inequality, given its dis-integrating effects. Some economic inequality is to be expected and may well be beneficial, but too much leads to there not being ‘a city […] [but] two cities at war with one another, that of the poor and that of the rich’ (4.422e ). Just as the ideal city’s founders aimed not to ‘make any one group outstandingly happy but to make the whole so, as far as possible’ (4.420b), its rulers must aim at the good of the city as a whole.

It should make sense that this is the virtue distinctive of the guardians, if we remember the earlier account of a virtue as what enables its possessor to perform its function well. Since the function of the rulers is—unsurprisingly—to rule, they can rule well only if they possess wisdom. A ruler who makes only lucky guesses, or even educated guesses, about what is best for the city is less likely to rule well than a ruler who knows what is best for the city. Now of course we can agree that rulers require wisdom to rule well without agreeing with Socrates’ conception of it or with his belief that only a few citizens are capable of it. One might be skeptical that knowledge about what is best for a city-state or country is really possible, settling instead for experience-grounded beliefs. And one might think wisdom is at least in principle within the grasp of ordinary citizens. We have already seen, and will see in more detail in Books VIII and IX, that Socrates is no fan of democracy—presumably because he is skeptical that ordinary citizens are capable of the sort of knowledge needed to rule well.

Courage (4.429a–430c)

Courage, like wisdom, is also a virtue distinctive of a particular class: the soldiering auxiliaries. It becomes clear that the guardians, who emerge from the auxiliaries, will also possess courage, but their distinctive (rather than sole) virtue is wisdom, not courage. As above, their possessing courage makes sense when we remember that the auxiliaries’ function is to protect the city, which they can do well only if they possess courage. A surprising way in which courage is similar to wisdom is that courage, at least as Socrates characterizes it, is at root a cognitive affair: it is ‘th[e] power to preserve through everything the correct and law-inculcated belief about what is to be feared and what is not’ (4.430b [emphasis added]). Attentive readers will have noticed that the wisdom the guardians possess is a kind of knowledge, but the auxiliaries’ courage is a matter of belief, not knowledge. Making clear how knowledge and belief differ will be a central focus of Books V, VI, and VII. It might be helpful to bring the JTB (justified true belief) conception of knowledge into play again (reminding ourselves that it is not Plato’s view but rather a heuristic to help us make sense of some features of the Republic). The auxiliaries believe that certain things are worse than death—slavery and dishonor, for example—but the guardians know why these things are worse than death: they have, in addition to a true belief, a justification for their true belief. While the auxiliaries’ beliefs lack the intellectual backing the guardians possess, this in no way prevents their holding it firmly and unshakably. Their belief that there are fates worse than death must be dyed-in-the-wool, in Socrates’ memorable metaphor: dyed in so deeply that ‘the color is fast—no amount of washing […] can remove it’ (4.429b). If the Spartan soldiers holding the pass at Thermopylae against Persian invaders—an event that, until the film The 300, was the province of classicists and history nerds—valued their own lives over the good of the community, they would have thrown down their weapons and run for safety. The opening pages of Book III, attentive readers will remember, were rife with constraints on stories and poetry designed to cultivate courage. Any would-be auxiliary who believes that their death would be the worst thing that could happen believes a true falsehood, a belief that is radically false and distorts an important dimension of reality. The auxiliaries’ education, both poetic and physical, is meant to cultivate the virtue of courage.

We should note a subtle but important refinement Socrates makes to his definition of courage. He first describes courage as the auxiliaries’ ‘power to preserve through everything its belief about what things are to be feared’ (4.429b), but he quickly adds a qualifier: courage is ‘preservation of the belief that has been inculcated by the law through education about what things and sorts of things are to be feared’ (4.429c [emphasis added]), a qualification he repeats a page later: ‘the correct and law-inculcated belief’ (4.430b). He is making a distinction between what Aristotle will later call natural virtue and virtue proper. Some people and indeed many animals seem by nature courageous, born with correct beliefs about what is properly feared and with the power to preserve those beliefs in the face of danger. But unless these beliefs are the product of education, what is present is not ‘courage but something else’ (4.430b). Socrates does not elaborate, but presumably he thinks this because proper courage’s natural analog may misfire without the guidance of reason and education. We have already seen that too much physical education and not enough musical education results in a person’s becoming ‘hard and harsh’ (3.410d) rather than courageous.

Moderation (4.430d–432b)

Unlike courage and wisdom, moderation is not distinctive of any particular class in the city; instead, ‘moderation spreads throughout the whole’ (4.432a). Socrates starts with the commonsense connection between moderation (also called temperance) and self-control. If you decline and I insist on a third slice of cheesecake, you seem to have and I seem to lack the virtue of moderation. But explaining this in terms of self-control is puzzling, Socrates thinks, since what does the controlling and what is controlled is the very same thing. The puzzle is solved when we realize that our souls have better and worse parts, with the better part comprising our capacities for reason and choice and the worse part our appetite and desires. In the self-controlled person, ‘the naturally better part is in control of the naturally worse’ (4.431a), so they decline that third slice of cheesecake while I do not.

There is something problematic about Socrates’ procedure here. The plan is to figure out the nature of the political virtues in order to discover the nature of the personal virtues. But here he is appealing to the structure of the soul or person in trying to understand the nature of the political virtue of moderation, so he is building into the polis the psychic structure he will soon claim to find there. As a grad school professor once wrote in the margins of a paper of mine, ‘if you are going to try to pull the rabbit out of the hat, it is best if you are not seen putting it in’. But perhaps there is no big problem here. After all, Socrates is simply appealing to an ordinary belief about moderation as a kind of self-control; he is not importing any high-level psychological theory, and he may well have been able to arrive at his conclusion—that ‘something in which the better rules the worse is properly called moderate and self-controlled’ (4.431b)—without the appeal to commonsense psychology.

The ideal polis is self-controlled and thus moderate, Socrates thinks, because it is ruled by the guardians, who are the best part of the polis. But there is more to it than that. A city in which the guardians only tenuously hold power over the rebellious craftspeople is not moderate, nor would Socrates think it is, for it is lacking the harmony distinctive of true self-control. In a moderate or self-controlled polis, the three classes ‘all sing the same song together’ (4.432a): there is ‘agreement between the naturally worse and the naturally better as to which of the two is to rule’ (4.432a).

As with the wisdom and courage, Socrates plays up the cognitive nature of this virtue: ‘ruler and ruled […] share the same belief about who should rule’ (4.431d ). They are in agreement, not in the way in which a good drawing or measurement agrees with its object or in the way in which some food agrees with my finicky stomach but other food does not, but in the way that only rational creatures can be: consent. We should tread carefully here, however, for the idea of consent can be misleading. Socrates is not offering the modern, liberal view that the legitimacy of a government turns on the consent of the governed. The consent Socrates has in mind is a symptom of good government, not a condition of its legitimacy. Presumably, in a well-governed city, the craftspeople consent to being governed by the guardians because things are going well for them economically; they are happy with the arrangement and are happy to be left alone to their cobbling, baking, doctoring, etc., and their family lives. The entitlement of the guardians to rule depends not on the consent of those they govern but on their possessing the relevant virtue, wisdom.

A word or two about the ‘spread out’ nature of moderation is in order. Unlike wisdom and courage, which are what we might call particular virtues, which are virtues distinctive of particular classes, moderation is a holistic virtue, a virtue of the whole city, not of any of its particular classes. This is a subtle point, easily misunderstood. Although a city is wise because its rulers are wise and brave because its auxiliaries are brave, Plato is not saying that the city is moderate because every class is moderate. Moderation does not work that way. By way of analogy, think of a basket containing red balls, green balls, and yellow balls. The collection of balls has a property which none of its members has: the property of being multi-colored. The collection is multi-colored because of the colors of the individual balls: if the basket contained only green balls, the collection would not exhibit the property of being multi-colored. But none of the individual balls in the basket is multi-colored: each is either red or green or yellow. (Of course, nothing prevents individual balls from being multi-colored: a particular ball might be red, green, and yellow—but none of the balls in our example has this property.) So the collection’s having this property depends upon the members having certain properties—but it is the collection, and not its members, that has the property of being multi-colored. Being multi-colored, in this example, is a holistic property, depending on the nature of the individuals but not reducible or equivalent to them.

The political virtue of moderation, as Socrates conceives of it, is the same kind of holistic property, belonging to the whole and not to the parts. It is not the case that the city is moderate because each class is moderate; rather, the city is moderate because the different classes agree about who should rule, just as the basket of balls is multi-colored even though none of the balls are.

Socrates’ talk of better and worse parts may be easier to hear when the parts in question are parts of the soul rather than the city. Thinking of the guardians as ‘naturally better’ than the craftspeople has a dissonant ring to egalitarian ears. As we noted when discussing the Noble Falsehood, the kind of equality that most readers will insist on (and which Plato has Socrates denying) is not factual equality. Some people can run or swim faster than others; some people are better at knitting than others; some people are better at differential equations than others. What is at issue is political equality, the belief that all citizens have equal rights to participating in the political life of their communities. We will see in the next chapter that Socrates expresses the view that being a woman does not in itself disqualify a person from being a guardian. But he certainly does not think that all women, or all men, are capable of being guardians, since so very few of us are capable of acquiring the requisite virtue, wisdom.

We will return to this topic in the next chapter and then again when discussing Plato’s attitudes toward democracy in Chapter 12, so for now the egalitarians among us should merely note our disagreement with Plato. But we should also be thinking of how we might go about trying to convince him, drawing on premises he himself would accept, that he is mistaken to reject political equality. It is not an easy task. But, as I have said before, one of the great benefits of carefully reading the Republic is that doing so can lead us to wrestle with difficult tasks like this, to question and defend propositions that seem self-evident to us but do not so appear to others.

Justice (4.432b–434d)

Since three of the four cardinal virtues have been identified, Socrates thinks that justice must be whatever is left. ‘Justice: it’s what is left over’ does not exactly inspire confidence, either as a bumper-sticker or a philosophical methodology. But Socrates’ point is that the answer to the Republic’s first question is staring them in the face, so to speak. They have been talking about it without even knowing it, he thinks, because justice is based on, and indeed seems to be a moralized version of the Specialization Principle: ‘justice’, he says, ‘is doing one’s own work, and not meddling with what is not one’s own’ (4.433a).

Although it is initially stated in terms of individual behavior, justice as a virtue of the polis is really a matter of each class doing its work: the craftspeople produce and exchange goods, the auxiliaries protect the city, and the guardians govern it. If this is indeed what justice is, Socrates’ earlier insistence that the guardians’ most important task is to protect against the mixing of the metals grows in importance. If their task is to ensure justice and prevent its opposite, then they must prevent the craftspeople from ruling, since, the Noble Falsehood informed us, ‘the city will be ruined if it ever has an iron or a bronze guardian’ (3.415c). When cobblers bake and bakers cobble, the city will have suboptimal bread and sandals (and not enough of them), since this violates the Specialization Principle, which requires specialization as a way of producing ‘more plentiful and better-quality goods’ (2.370c). But occupation-switching is disastrous, and not merely suboptimal, when bakers and guardians switch roles. A baking guardian who lacks the baker’s skill will produce bread that is not very good, but a ruling baker who lacks the guardian’s wisdom will produce disaster, on Socrates’ view.

Justice as non-meddling has intriguing parallels in Confucius’ Analects. When asked about good governing, Confucius replies, ‘The ruler must rule, the minister minister, the father father, and the son son’ (12.11). Underlying Confucius’ somewhat odd way of making his point is that roles are not merely descriptive but rather normative, providing rules and norms of conduct. (This echoes the discussion of the ‘precise sense’ of craft-terms such as ‘ruler’ back in Book I.) A widely heard complaint about contemporary American parenting is that too many parents seek to be their children’s friend (searching Google or Yahoo for ‘be a parent not a friend’, for example, yields millions of hits). But even without investigating the complaint’s merits, we see its point, which is both a Platonic and Confucian one. We each inhabit many roles: citizen, friend, neighbor, mother, cousin, customer, boss, etc., and it may not always be clear which role is appropriate in a given situation. To a great degree, practical wisdom is a matter of seeing which role is appropriate in the circumstances so one can then act accordingly. And of course it is not always clear what the role requires, even when one determines which role is called for. It may be that in interacting with a particular employee on a particular day, being a friend rather than a boss is what is called for. But it may be that a different situation calls for just the opposite.

Although this idea of the normative status of roles is plausible and intriguing—indeed, Confucianism is often thought of as a kind of role ethics—many readers will be understandably uncomfortable with the political implications of Plato’s role-based account of justice, rejecting the idea of assigning to a fellow citizen ‘the rank appropriate to his nature’ (3.415c), for it seems an easy, morally problematic slide from here to insisting that others ‘know their place’. Role ethics is a fascinating topic, but exploring it in more depth would take us too far afield. So instead, let us briefly explore two arguments Socrates makes in support of his definition of political justice.

The first argument is explicitly marked in a way that should garner our attention: ‘Look at it this way if you want to be convinced’ (4.433e), Socrates says. The argument turns on the proper role of a judge, which is not surprising, given the focus on roles. The ideal city’s rulers will also be judges, Socrates argues, and a judge’s ‘sole aim’ is that ‘no citizen should have what belongs to another or be deprived of what is his own’ (4.433e)—because this, intuitively, is just. Therefore, Socrates concludes, ‘the having and doing of one’s own would be accepted as justice’ (4.434a). This seems plausible, and Glaucon finds it so. But a more critically disposed reader might question the sudden appearance of ‘doing one’s own’ in the conclusion, when the premises have concerned only having one’s own. Socrates’ argument is commonsensical and intuitive because it concerns property: justice requires that I not be wrongfully deprived of my property. Is what one does properly thought of something one has? Are one’s roles to be counted among one’s property? Perhaps, but if being, doing, and having are distinct metaphysical categories, we should be leery of fusing them into each other.

The second argument is also simple and straightforward. Since ‘meddling and exchange between these three classes’—that is, the mixing of the metals—‘is the greatest harm that can happen to the city’ and injustice is the worst thing one can do to one’s city, it follows, Socrates argues, that ‘meddling is injustice’ (4.434c). And if meddling is injustice, it must follow that its opposite, not meddling, is justice. A reader who suspects that this argument begs the question—that it assumes the truth of what it is trying to prove—seems to be on the mark. Only someone who already accepts the proposed definition of justice would accept the argument’s first premise, that meddling is the worst evil that could befall the city. And even waiving that worry, egalitarian-minded readers who are friendly to democracy are likely to think that the first premise is simply false. They are likelier to think that the hierarchical, elitist structure of Socrates’ ideal city is among the worst evils that can befall a political community. And sharp-minded readers will wonder whether Socrates is confusing cause and effect, thinking that even by Socrates’ lights the meddling itself is not the great evil but rather is the cause of the evil, which presumably is the disintegration of the city. Many such readers will be skeptical that meddling or metals-mixing will cause the great harm Socrates claims for it.

In addition to these external worries about Socrates’ definition of justice, there is an internal worry about it—that is, a worry from within Socrates’ point of view—concerning the cardinality of the cardinal virtues. Piety, the reader will remember, is treated elsewhere in the Republic (and elsewhere in Plato’s dialogues) as a distinct virtue in its own right. But Socrates does not count it as a cardinal virtue (or even mention it) in Book IV. Earlier I suggested that attempting to regard piety as a form of justice (and thus retaining Socrates’ view that there are only four moral virtues) did not pan out. Here, the concern is that justice, as Socrates describes it, and moderation are so similar that it is difficult to count them as two virtues. A city is moderate when all three classes ‘share the same belief about who should rule’ (4.431de) and it is just when each class does its own work, but it is hard to see how those are really different, since each class doing its own work seems to be the embodiment of the agreement. Although making an agreement and acting on it are not the same thing—as anyone who has had a contractual dispute or, to choose a homier example, anyone who has experienced a child not being willing to go to bed at the agreed-upon time, can attest—the difference here does not seem sufficient to justify viewing moderation and justice as distinct cardinal virtues. If we are tempted to insist that the difference between agreement and action is sufficient to justify claims of cardinality, we might find our position turned against us. After all, an opponent might argue, could not the same be said about courage? Surely a belief that x is an appropriate object of fear and acting on that belief are not the same thing, even if they are closely related. If so, there would need to be another virtue, related to but distinct from courage; and if that is the case, then Socrates is mistaken that ‘there are four virtues’ (4.428a).

While Socrates does not wrestle with this problem directly, his view that justice is a sort of meta-virtue might implicitly solve his problem. The prefix ‘meta-’ suggests a higher-level or higher-order aboutness. Meta-cognition is cognition about cognition: thinking about thinking. Though it is often more at home in psychological contexts, there is a sense in which we are engaged in meta-cognition here: we are thinking about Plato’s thinking about justice. So to call justice a meta-virtue is to suggest that it is a virtue about the other virtues. Even so, there is a sense in which thinking of justice as a meta-virtue can be misleading. Cognition comes before meta-cognition: there is no thinking about thinking unless there is first some thinking to think about! But on Socrates’ view, justice comes before the other virtues: it is the condition of their possibility, ‘the power that makes it possible for them to grow in the city and that preserves them when they have grown for as long as it remains there itself’ (4.433b). It is worth emphasizing the word ‘power’ in this description (the Greek word is δύναμις (dunamis), from which the English word ‘dynamic’ derives). Justice is a power that enables agreement about who should rule; it is what makes it possible for there to be an agreement in the first place. Justice so conceived is not merely everyone’s doing his own work, but is rather ‘the power that consists in everyone’s doing his own work’ (4.433d [emphasis added]). Similarly, courage is not merely the correct belief about what is appropriately feared, but is ‘the power to preserve through everything [the] belief about what things are to be feared’ (4.429c). Earlier, I emphasized the belief at the center of courage, to draw a contrast with the knowledge that constitutes wisdom. Indeed, that is what enabled the imaginary interlocutor above to drive a wedge between belief and action. Reminding ourselves that courage is not merely a belief, but rather the power to preserve that belief through thick and thin, closes that gap.

Socrates’ idea that justice is what makes the other virtues possible certainly makes sense for moderation, especially if we remember that the shared agreement about who should rule is a symptom of a well-governed city, and not, as we moderns tend to think, the ultimate condition of the government’s legitimacy. It seems initially to make less sense for courage and wisdom, since they are particular rather than holistic virtues (virtues distinctive of particular classes rather than of the city as a whole). Would would-be rulers and auxiliaries still possess their distinctive virtues even if justice did not prevail in the city? Those capable of ruling would still know what is best for the city as a whole even if they are not in fact ruling, and the same would seem to go for would-be auxiliaries. Indeed, just these sorts of situations arise as the ideal city begins to disintegrate, as described by Socrates in Books VIII and IX. Perhaps. But the time and attention Socrates has devoted to education in the ideal city suggests that while wisdom and courage can be defined and understood independently of justice, they cannot be manifested or made real in its absence. Much of the program of education Socrates spells out in Books II and III is devoted to educating the auxiliaries. He will return to education in Book VII, but there his focus will be on educating the guardians, sketching out a program that will ultimately enable them to grasp the nature of goodness itself, which they will need if they are to know what is best for the city as a whole and not merely have correct beliefs about this. So even if we can understand what courage and wisdom are independently of justice, we can imagine Socrates saying, those virtues will never come to be without the rigorous educational program of Books II, III, and VII, which is why it is so crucial for the guardians to defend it and resist all attempts to change it even slightly. In Book III Socrates indicates that the guardians’ most important task is to prevent the mixing of the metals described in the Noble Falsehood: ‘there is nothing that they must guard better or watch more carefully than the mixture of metals in the souls of the next generation’ (3.415b). What he says in Book IV initially seems to conflict with this, since there he suggests that their most important task is to ‘guard the one great thing […] education and upbringing […] [that] those in charge must cling to education […] guarding it against everything’ (4.423d–24b). It seems that these distinct tasks cannot be the one most important task. But indeed, they really are one and the same task, since the only way to prevent the mixing of the metals is to preserve the educational system. Indeed, as we will see when Socrates describes the disintegration of the ideal city in Books VIII and IX, the decay begins when ‘they have less consideration for music and poetry than they ought [… and] then they will neglect physical training’ (8.546d). These changes to education are quickly followed by ‘[t]he intermixing of iron with silver and bronze with gold’ (8.546e).

So while justice is conceptually distinct from the other cardinal virtues, they depend upon it for their coming into being in the city. Justice and the other virtues, while conceptually distinct, are not really or existentially distinct: justice is the condition of their coming into existence. Thus it is a tad misleading to call it a ‘meta-virtue’, since it is about the other virtues in a distinct way: it is the condition of their reality. It is their basis—their ἀρχή (archê) or foundation.

The Allegory of the Cave: Book VII

The Allegory of the Cave is arguably the most famous part of the Republic. Although it is clearly related to the Sun and Divided Line analogies (indeed, Socrates explicitly connects the Cave and the Sun at 7.517bc), Plato marks its special status by opening Book VII with it, emphasizing its importance typographically, so to speak (he will do much the same thing in Book IX with the discussion of the tyrannical soul). Although an allegory is sometimes defined as a symbolic narrative that can be interpreted as having a hidden meaning, Plato is not cagey about the Cave Allegory’s meaning: it is about ‘the effect of education (παιδεία [paideia]) and the lack of it on our nature’ (7.514a). Given how visual the allegory is, many readers will find it helpful to draw themselves a diagram of it.

Education, the Allegory’s topic, is not what most people think it is, says Plato: it is not ‘putting knowledge into souls that lack it’ (7.518b). Though education sometimes requires that kind of transmission of knowledge from teacher to student, this is not its essence, which instead is ‘turning the whole soul’ (7.518d)—turning it around, ultimately toward the Form of the good. Education as turning around is a powerful metaphor, capturing the way in which learning involves gaining new perspectives, seeing everyday things and events from new points of view. Everyone, Plato insists, is capable of education in this sense (7.518c). But not everyone is capable of making it out of the Cave into the intelligible world of the Forms, just as not everyone is capable of winning a Nobel Prize in Physics or an Olympic medal in Figure Skating. Nonetheless, everyone has the capacity to be educated, to turn their soul from what is less real toward what is more real.

Stages in the Cave Allegory

I count six distinct stages in the Cave Allegory. While such divisions are always prey to arbitrariness and subjective preference, I hope that the division I offer sheds light on what Plato is up to here.

In the first stage, the cave’s residents are prisoners, chained to their seats and unable to move not only their bodies but—crucially—their heads. They can only look straight ahead, and thus have only one perspective on what they see on the cave’s wall. What they see are the shadows of a sort of puppet show taking place behind them, with shadows cast by the light of a fire. The puppets are various artifacts: ‘statues of people and other animals, made out of stone, wood, and every material’ (7.514b). The prisoners watch the shadow-play, ignorant of the true nature of what they see: they ‘believe that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of those artifacts’ (7.515c). They take for reality what is a mere image of it. Some readers will have already noticed that Stage One is parallel to the lowest section of the Divided Line (segment a), the objects of which are images and shadows.

In the second stage, one of the prisoners is freed from their bonds. Plato does not tell us by whom or how; we are left to wonder whether the prisoner was saved by human agency or by the natural decay of their fetters. There is reason to think it is the former, since the freed prisoner is ‘suddenly compelled to stand up, turn his head, walk, and look up toward the light’ (7.515c), and somebody else seems to be doing the compelling. This is not the only time Plato connects education with compulsion, with being forced to turn one’s head and gain a new perspective. Nor is it the only time when the head-turning that constitutes education will be painful. When the freed prisoner is forced to look at the shadow-casting fire that until this moment they were unaware of, they will be ‘pained and dazzled and unable to see the things whose shadows they had seen before’ (7.515c). They will probably not like the experience at all, even though in being freed from their fetters they are thereby ‘cured of [their] ignorance’ (7.515c)—not merely freed but cured, as if ignorance is a disease. It is a comfortable disease, to borrow a phrase from e. e. cummings, for it is a world the cave-dweller is familiar with and comfortable in. Turned around and out of their comfort zone, they are unable to recognize the shadow-casting puppets, despite their skill at recognizing the shadows the puppets cast on the wall. Although the artifacts are, like any sensible particulars, not fully real, they are more real than the shadows they cast. Thus in looking at the shadow-casting artifacts the freed prisoner is ‘a bit closer to the things that are and is turned towards things that are more’ (7.515d); this is the existential sense of the verb ‘to be’ that we distinguished earlier: the prisoner is closer to the things that are real—that exist—and indeed is coming closer to the things that are fully real: the Forms. While not everyone is capable of making it out of the Cave, Plato thinks that everyone is capable of being turned from the shadows to the shadow-casting artifacts—of moving from the lowest segment (segment a) of the Divided Line to the next highest (segment b), the realm of belief proper.

Screens—television screens, phone screens, computer screens—are the Cave walls of today. When we uncritically accept the words and images we see there, we are like the chained prisoners. But if we turn and look at the sources of the information flickering before us, we might recognize that the information is distorted by bias and ulterior motive. Unlike the Cave’s puppeteers, who do not seem to derive any benefit from their shadow-casting, the shadow-casters of our age typically do derive some benefit, and frequently their power depends upon our remaining chained, accepting the images they project before us, and believing that ‘the truth is nothing other than the shadows’ (7.515e). While being turned around is good for us, we often do not initially like it. But there is also a danger that in being turned around we will reject information we disagree with and take its source to be biased. Clearly, many sources are biased, but if we reject every artifact that comes from a puppeteer we do not like, it is not clear that we are any better off than we were before we turned to look. In fact, we might be worse off if we fall prey to the belief that critical thinking involves (merely) rejecting—perhaps as ‘fake news’—anything emanating from sources we identify as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ or whatever. Education, in the end, is not just any kind of turning around; it requires that the student be ‘turned the right way’ (7.518).

In the third stage we again see the role that compulsion plays in the Cave Allegory, for an unnamed, unidentified someone will ‘drag [the freed prisoner] away from there by force, up the rough, steep path’ (7.515e). Although Socrates devotes just one sentence to the third stage, what he says later in Book VII indicates that this rough, steep path symbolizes the formal education that potential philosopher-rulers receive. This four-subject education is the basis of the quadrivium of classical liberal education, the sort of education suitable to a free person. It is education centered on number: arithmetic (number itself), geometry (number in space), harmonics or music theory (number in time), and physics or astronomy (number in space and time). All these number-based subjects ‘lead the soul and turn it around towards the study of that which is’ (7.524e), which ultimately is the Form of the good. While there are certainly practical applications of these subjects, the would-be philosopher-queens and -kings study them ‘not like tradesmen and retailers [… but] for ease in turning the soul around, away from becoming and towards truth and being’ (7.525c). These disciplines prepare would-be philosophers not for craft-based careers in the sensible world, where they might be bakers or cobblers or doctors (although it will prepare them to be generals, as they are the city’s guardians), but rather for citizenship in the intelligible world. They will learn to think abstractly, grasping essences and integrating Forms, which is presumably why studying geometry ‘tends to make it easier to see the Form of the good’ (7.526d). As the way out of the Cave, these subjects are ‘merely preludes to […] the song that dialectic sings’ (7.531d–32a), and that is a tune that is sung only in the intellectual sunlight of the intelligible world outside of the Cave.

In stage four, the prisoner is not just freed from their fetters but has made it out of the Cave into the intelligible world above, which corresponds to the top half of the Divided Line (segments c and d). Looking at the fire in the cave hurt their eyes, and they find emerging into the sunlight painful, just as a mid-afternoon moviegoer who leaves a dark theater is pained by the bright parking lot outside. At first, they will only be able to look at shadows of the objects in the world above, here cast by the light of the sun rather than the fire, or their reflections in water, or look at the objects at night. Just as the shadows on the cave wall were mere copies of the artifacts held before the fire, those artifacts are mere copies of the Forms, which are ‘the things themselves’ (7.516a). Although Socrates does not say, we can assume that there is one Form for each of the many particular objects in the cave. Whether there is one tree—the Form of treeness itself—or one oak tree, one maple tree, one white pine, one yellow pine, etc. is an interesting question to ponder, but it is not one we need to answer to understand the Cave Allegory or the Republic as a whole.

At stage five, the former cave dweller is able to look directly at the sun, ‘not images of it in water or some alien place, but the sun itself, in its own place, and be able to study it’ (7.516b). Presumably not everyone who makes it out of the Cave is able to do this. Mathematicians and scientists study the Forms relevant to their disciplines, but they do not see other Forms or how the Forms they contemplate are related to these other Forms, and they certainly do not see the Form of the good—that vision is reserved for genuine philosophers, and there are very few of them. So presumably the fourth stage in the Cave Allegory corresponds to Thought on the Divided Line, while the fifth stage is where Understanding operates.

In stage six, the sun-contemplating philosopher first thinks back on his life in the cave, and reflecting on ‘what passed for wisdom there’ (7.516c), smiles ruefully and feels pity for the others still trapped in their ignorance, who ‘know’ only the shadows on the wall or the artifacts casting them. What would happen if the enlightened philosopher descended into the cave? They will not be greeted as a returning, liberating hero, Socrates thinks. The denizens of the dark world below will first think the returning philosopher a fool: until their eyes, used to the bright light of the intelligible world, have adjusted to the darkness of the cave, they will be unable to recognize the shadows or the puppets. Like the ship owner who thinks the true captain is a useless stargazer (6.489c), the cave dwellers will think the enlightened philosopher a fool who has ruined their eyesight (not to mention his economic prospects) by looking too long at the sun. But if they persist and try to free the prisoners and turn them toward the firelight or drag those who are able out of the cave, they will think their ‘liberator’ is worse than useless: they will think them dangerous, and ‘if they could somehow get their hands on him […] they [would] kill him’ (7.517a).

Plato does his readers a good turn by having Socrates explicitly connect the Sun and Cave metaphors (7.5157bc), but he leaves the task of fitting together the Divided Line and Cave to us. Fortunately, connecting them is fairly straightforward, as we have already seen. The shadows on the Cave’s wall correspond to the images seen at the Divided Line’s lowest section (segment a), the realm of Imaging. The shadow-casting puppets held before the fire correspond to ‘the originals of [the Line’s] images’ (6.510a), in segment b. Just as the shadows are copies of the originating artifacts, these artifacts, which are at home in the Visible World, are in turn copies of the Forms, which of course reside in the Intelligible World (section c). Plato is not suggesting that the images, shadows, and reflections are not real, but rather that they are less real than the originals they are images of. This has a lot of intuitive appeal: I can create a shadow of my hand by interposing it between my desk and lamp, but the shadow cast seems less real than my hand in at least a couple of ways. First, while my hand is a three-dimensional object, the shadow is only two-dimensional, lacking the dimension of depth. Second, the shadow depends for its existence on the presence of my hand (and on the presence of the ‘third thing’ that features in the Sun Analogy: light). My hand still exists when I turn off my desk lamp or move it out of the lamp’s range, but the shadow no longer exists. Shadows, reflections in mirrors and water, etc.—the stuff of segment a of the Line—are ephemeral. They are not unreal—my seeing the shadow is not an optical illusion: there is something there, just something whose existence is thinner and flimsier than the objects at the Line’s second section (segment b). Now—and here’s the metaphysically important point—just as the shadows and reflections are copies of what seem to be independently existing objects, these objects themselves are copies of the Forms they instantiate. The bed the carpenter makes, Socrates argues in Book X, is ‘something which is like that which is’ (10.597a). The second ‘is’ is the ‘is’ of existence: the built bed is like what is real, what fully exists. Its resembling the Form of bedness is what makes it a bed and not a table, but, just as Van Gogh’s paintings of his bed at Arles are copies of the bed he slept in, so too is that bed a copy of the Form. Thus Plato’s metaphysical point can be put as a ratio, image: original :: original: Form.

There is much that Plato leaves unsaid about the Cave. Who first frees the prisoner? Who drags them up and out of the cave? Who are the puppeteers? What, if any, benefit do they derive from keeping the prisoners occupied with shadows? Glaucon says toward the outset that these are ‘strange prisoners’, to which Socrates replies, ‘they are like us’ (7.515a), so with a bit of imagination we can fill in some of these blank spots.