Civic and Spiritual Decay: Republic 8 and 9 (545c-576b)

As Aristotle would later put it, there are many ways to miss a target, but only one way to hit it (Nichomachean Ethics 1106c). If we agree with Socrates that both the soul and the city are divided into three parts, and that when it comes to both city and soul, one of these parts must rule, then there is one way to hit the target of justice (putting reason/philosophers in charge), and two ways to miss it (putting spirit/auxiliaries in charge or putting appetite/moneymakers in charge). To say that a part of the soul rules is to say what takes priority. Athletes tend to be spirited people, who like to win. They will sacrifice bodily pleasure through grueling training in the pursuit of victory. Socrates sees this as putting spirit before appetite, and he finds it commendable. But what about someone who puts a desire for winning ahead of a desire for truth, for instance, by using steroids? It is not that such a person is uninterested in truth or bodily pleasures, he is simply more interested in winning. He lets his desire for winning rule.

Things get more complicated as Socrates lays out his argument. Appetite, it turns out, is internally complex. (Socrates refers to it as a many-headed chimera.) The first division is between necessary and unnecessary appetites. We saw this in Republic 2’s distinction between a modest city, where the basic needs for food, shelter, and sex are met, and the city with a fever that goes beyond basic needs by bringing in prostitutes, luxuries, and pork. The athletic training of book 2 responded to this division through its emphasis on a moderate diet, which helps young souls educate their appetites through moderation/discipline.² Unnecessary desires are further divided into the lawful and the lawless. The Greek for “lawless,” paranomos, does not mean just “illegal” but “outside the norm.”³ We might say “taboo” or “gross.” Socrates gives the example of having sex with animals. Wanting a big house is one thing; bestiality is another. Given the divisions within appetite, it turns out there are five classes of goods that one may seek, and five analogous classes that could rule a soul or city. Socrates refers to them as constitutions (see table 3).

Rather than merely laying these out for comparison, Socrates arranges them in a process of decay. Nothing lasts forever, and he sets out how over the course of generations an aristocratic city/person will give birth to a timocratic city/person, and so on.⁴

While Republic 1 was frustratingly brief in throwing around big ideas without defining them, Republic 8–9 can seem somewhat plodding as Socrates and his companions dutifully walk through these various options. The main point, for present purposes, is that decay comes about when people do not hold to the proper curriculum of music and gym training. This leads to “unmusical” people who care more for reputation than learning, thus prompting the slip from aristocracy to timocracy. Such people/states, who thanks to their gym training still live highly disciplined lives, eventually start hoarding money. This prompts the slip from timocracy into oligarchy. When this discipline gives out, people turn from necessary appetites to unnecessary ones, prompting the slip from oligarchy to democracy.⁵ Such people see themselves as “free.” Socrates sees them as flighty. They have neither the discipline nor the grace brought about by rigorous training in music and athletics, so they float from one thing to another, following trends and chasing shadows. Having such people set policy is a recipe for disaster.

In political terms, Socrates sees tyrants as people who can successfully play a crowd, capitalizing on political and economic instability, to grab power. If successful, a tyrant eliminates anyone smart enough or strong enough to oppose him, surrounding himself with yes-men and keeping everyone else distracted via smear campaigns and fearmongering. In an ironic twist, democracy, which celebrates freedom, gives way to tyranny in which basically everyone is enslaved. The tyrannical individual, meanwhile, is someone who lives his life for unlawful, unnecessary desires. Socrates refers to this kind of desire as passion. The Greek term for “passion,” erōs, is the subject of Plato’s Symposium. Here it means something more like “lust.”

If Socrates’s division of the state and the soul are correct, then aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny are the options for structuring a city or soul.⁶ Which state would you want to live in? Which kind of person would you want to be? Where would you place today’s societies within this scheme?

Comparing Constitutions: Republic 9 (576b-580c)

Modern readers, particularly in the United States, are often baffled by Plato’s attack on democracy, and its denigration of freedom. Karl Popper famously dedicated the first volume of his work The Open Society and Its Enemies to Plato.⁷ Such critiques, I suggest, stem from running together two differing conceptions of freedom. People today tend to think of freedom in terms of freedom from external restraints. The more options you have, the freer you are. We see this kind of freedom at play in Republic 8’s presentation of democracy. But there is also the freedom to pursue the good. We find this in Socrates’s presentation of the aristocracy, where each member of society is free to pursue whatever he or she is best at by nature. Understood this way, the freer you are, the fewer options you have. Perfect freedom is found in reducing your options to the one right one.⁸ In practical terms, what would you rather have: the one job that is perfect for you or a choice between a bunch of jobs, none of which you will ever be satisfied with? If you are a typical American, you will probably want both: unrestrained options and the perfect job. Socrates’s point is that this is not realistic. Some restraints are good. Finding out what you are not good at can be a useful step toward finding what you should be doing.⁹

The tyrant, Socrates argues, is an extreme example of someone who strives for freedom but ends up enslaving himself in the process (576b-580c). On the outside, he lives surrounded by bodyguards in constant fear of people challenging his rule. On the inside, the parts of his soul are in full-out civil war. His passion drives him to ignore truth or reputation. As a result, he will take ill-informed actions and then regret them. Lacking both musical grace and athletic discipline, he has no consistency and is constantly unsettled. In Republic’s terms, this person is severely mentally ill.

The truly free person is the one with a just, aristocratic soul, for whom reason rules over appetites with the aid of spirit. He enjoys mental health.¹⁰ Even if we accept this argument, having a just soul may still not sound like much fun. Socrates responds to this worry with two arguments that make use of the fact that each part of the soul has its characteristic pleasure. Everyone is familiar with the sensual pleasures of appetite. Athletes are well familiar with the spirited pleasure of victory. Anyone who has worked through a problem and come to a lightbulb moment has experienced the rational pleasure of discovering truth. Socrates’s first argument is that since (a) philosophers prefer rational pleasures to the pleasures of spirit and appetite and (b) philosophers are unique in being familiar with all three kinds of pleasure, rational pleasures are, therefore, the best pleasures (580d-583a). Socrates’s second argument is that the only way to get all three kinds of pleasure is by putting reason in charge (583a-588b). Sensory pleasures are fleeting. To live your life going for nothing more than sensual pleasures is not a recipe for satisfaction. Likewise, spirited pleasures of honor and reputation can be a good thing. They can also get ugly. While it is fine to want a good reputation, we want to be known for the right things. How can you tell what the right things are? Use your reason to perform periodic reality checks. That is what reason is for: it looks for the good overall and works out ways to satisfy each of the soul’s three parts. In short, philosophers have the most fun.

At this point, the two tracks of Socrates’s city/individual analogy come close to colliding. On the one hand, the ideal city needs people to occupy each of the three classes; yet according to book 9’s argument, only philosophers lead the best lives. Would the auxiliaries and productive classes be content with second- or third-best? Even worse, if wisdom is required for happiness, and only philosophers are able to attain knowledge of holistic goods, is it not the case that philosophers will be the only people with harmonious souls and happy lives? Kevin Crotty responds to this worry by suggesting that individuals’ pursuit of whatever profession best fits them is what generates virtue for both the individual and the state. Philosophy/governance is one profession, which is driven by understanding of the form of the good. Carpentry is another profession, within the productive class, which is driven by knowledge of the form of, say, the couch.¹¹ In either case, professionals use reason to look to forms and guide their work. Furthermore, people sincerely invested in their work, whether it be statecraft or carpentry, will take pride in it and not cut corners even when they can get away with doing so (compare Gyges’s ring in Republic 2). Such people set spirited desires above appetitive ones. Pouring oneself into a career that fits one’s own talents and interests becomes a recipe for developing an ordered, virtuous soul.¹² It also makes for competent professionals who make useful contributions to society. Here, we find a mutual dependence between the virtue and flourishing of the individual and the virtue and flourishing of the state. Rather than see a zero-sum game, where the philosophers get the best lives and everyone else gets scraps, Plato presents a picture of mutual dependence, encouraging us to set aside concerns for comparative ranking and to look honestly at how each of us can create a meaningful life by contributing to the community.

Socrates closes Republic 9 with another image: inside each of us is a human, a lion, and a chimera (588b-592b). The human, which he calls the most godlike, represents our reason; the lion represents our spirit; and the chimera, with its many heads, represents our appetite. Giving in to unnecessary passions merely feeds the chimera, which proceeds to enslave our inner lion and human. Without anyone holding it in check, the chimera (particularly its most bestial heads) grows to the point that not even it is satisfied. It is bad enough to have unlawful desires. Acting on them just makes things worse. The worst case is when you act on them and get away with it. The point of punishment is to tame the inner beast. In a complete inversion of Thrasymachus’s argument from Republic 1, getting away with injustice is the worst thing possible for the unjust person. It is much better to have one’s inner lion keep the chimera in check. Best of all is for one’s inner human to act as the master animal-handler, taming both the lion and the chimera. In this way, the individual can act on necessary, and perhaps even unnecessary yet lawful, passions, albeit within reason. He may also care about status within reason. This is the image of justice as psychic harmony and mental health that Socrates has been building for the last eight books.¹³

Afterword: Republic 10

Having come full circle and tied a neat bow on the argument, Socrates keeps going. The first half of Republic 10 ties together the discussions of poetry that are scattered throughout books 2–9.¹⁴ The second half looks to the rewards of justice after death, recalling Socrates’s discussion with Cephalus at the start of Republic 1. This section opens with a somewhat convoluted argument for the soul’s immortality, which makes ample use of the body/soul parallels Socrates has used throughout Republic (608c-612b). Perhaps more convincing is the argument that, despite what was agreed to in addressing Glaucon’s challenge, just people typically do receive the benefit of justice while alive (612b-614a). Unjust people, as Socrates sees it, are like runners who sprint ahead at the start but fall apart before completing a race. Just people, by contrast, are like distance runners whose steady pace and long-term goals make them victorious in the end.

Socrates drives the point home by offering a myth (614a-621b).¹⁵ Er, so the story goes, died, traveled to the underworld, and then returned to life without drinking from the river of forgetfulness. His story serves as a cautionary tale about the postmortem consequences of our actions during life. Each soul spends one thousand years being rewarded, punished, or chastised for its actions on earth. At the end of each cycle, souls are brought together by the Fates and given a choice of lives (617d-621a). Er observes a number of mythological figures, including the female athlete, Atalanta, who decides to come back as a man. The philosophical point is that people with souls out of balance make bad life choices. Er watched one soul dazzled by wealth choose the life of a tyrant, only to learn that he will end up eating his own children. Even those who get the last pick can find a life that will be satisfactory. As Republic 2–9 have shown through the psychology of the three-part soul, what we value most, what rules within our soul, will shape the kind of life we lead.

Plato’s Response to Socrates

Socrates’s approach to philosophy is famously summed up at Apology 38a: “The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.” In Apology, Socrates embodies human wisdom: not thinking that one knows things that one does not know is the virtue associated with the examined life. In living such a life, one embraces perplexity (aporia) and continues the search for knowledge. The end goal, however, is divine wisdom, whose robust content allows the gods to live lives far beyond any human happiness. Republic sits somewhere between these two extremes. Socrates, here speaking for Plato, moves beyond the aporia of book 1, grounding an account of civic and personal virtue in more fundamental accounts of human nature, and how human beings relate to one another and to the fundamental structures of the world. All of this, however, is explicitly presented as an elaborate hypothesis, not yet anchored in nonhypothetical knowledge of the form of the good. The theory is provisional. If Socratic cross-examination (elenchos) ends with a mostly negative “It turns out we don’t know what we thought we did: let us keep inquiring,” then Republic’s method of hypothesis ends with a more positive “We still lack knowledge, but let us treat this theory as provisional, and see where it takes us.” In short, neither Republic nor Symposium offers final, set-in-stone answers to Socrates’s questions. Rather, both works point beyond themselves to more fundamental realities and provide regimes of spiritual exercise for pursuing them, be they Symposium’s erotic pursuit of immortal beauty or Republic’s fifty-year curriculum of music, gymnastics, math, and dialectic. The nature of the exercise has shifted from Socratic elenchos to Platonic hypothesis. In both cases, though, Socrates, his companions in dialogue, and Plato’s readers are all left with quite a lot of work to do.

This work-in-progress reading plays out in the lives of Republic’s hypothetical philosopher kings and queens. While it takes fifty years for them to come to knowledge of the form of the good, this learning is merely a prelude to the real task of governance. Such knowledge does not constitute an answer key or how-to manual for statecraft. Rather, philosophical rulers will move constantly between the form of the good and concrete political situations, much like the carpenter checking his work against the form of the couch. Here again, Eryximachus’s image of erōs as a process of filling and emptying provides a fitting image for the philosophical life, as philosopher rulers bring mortal systems in line with immortal models through a process that continues for as long as the city lasts.

In reading Republic and Symposium against the background of the ancient gym, I have highlighted their debt to Hippocratic medicine. Plato scholars routinely recognize the holistic nature of such ideas insofar as bodily, mental, and civic health are understood in terms of internal balance. However, Hippocratic thinking is holistic also in how individual people and even demographic groups are conceptualized as belonging to larger systems. Hippocratic doctors are forerunners of current movements in preventative medicine, which make social and environmental determinants of health central to regimens of care. The size and complexity of our modern population, global economy, and information systems make systemic thinking even more necessary than it was for Plato’s original readers. We see this in social justice movements, which call attention to entrenched inequalities such as the effects of social determinants of health on different racial groups (see the introduction to part 2). Republic, for all its complexity, provides a streamlined version of Plato’s own world. And several centuries later, Republic gives modern readers an opportunity to practice systemic thinking.

In approaching Symposium and Republic through the lens of the gymnasium, we have also highlighted the importance of purpose in the educational programs they set out. This focus on purpose has been largely ignored by scholars.¹⁶ Or, worse, people like Popper read Republic as an attempt to crush individual autonomy in service of an authoritarian state. Parallels between Republic’s sorting mechanisms and current work in developmental and positive psychology show Popper’s thinking to be backward. A good deal of the systemic thinking advanced in Republic involves identifying individuals’ strengths and interests and finding ways to nurture those in service of the greater community’s needs. Helping individuals find purpose does not crush autonomy; it enables it. Today, talk of purpose is too often associated with religion. Outside of schools with religious affiliations, questions of purpose tend to be addressed in career offices and not as part of the academic curriculum. Plato bridges the gap between academics and career counseling. Via the method of hypothesis, Republic and Symposium invite readers to separate and explore different aspects of their inner lives and broader contexts, and then to step back and think creatively about how they might fit all these pieces together.

Yet Plato goes beyond today’s psychologists. For him, it is not enough merely to pursue purpose (aligning one’s skills and interests with broader needs): this purpose must also be grounded in a sense of transcendence.¹⁷ We must bring mortal life into sync with immortal models. This can sound otherworldly when compared to a typical career-office conversation. Athletics and music, once again, bring Plato’s thinking back to earth. For many of us, finding a rhythm is a key experience of bringing the mortal and immortal into sync.¹⁸ Whether or not we go on to pursue formal study in mathematics and physiology, Plato’s bigger point is that immortal realities permeate the world around us. In the political realm, Symposium’s striving after immortality is captured in today’s concerns for sustainability.¹⁹ As human beings, we straddle the mortal/immortal divide: the secret to happiness is the constant pursuit of excellence as we continually and creatively shape our daily lives around eternal standards in our professional pursuits, whatever they may be. We might disagree with the particulars of Republic’s class system or the way Plato divides the soul, but by engaging in such disagreements we draw closer to ourselves and closer to the world we live in. With this, we are set on our way to building our own best lives.