Glaucon’s Challenge: Republic 2 (357–367)

Republic 2 starts with one of the most economical pages of philosophy ever written. Glaucon divides all goods into three classes (357; see table 1).

Some of these seem uncontroversial. Harmless pleasures, such as a couple of cookies that do not impact your health, are good for their own sake and not really much else.¹ Medicine, by contrast, is good for its consequences but not the sort of thing you would seek out for its own sake. Money, likewise, is good not in itself but for what it can buy.

According to Glaucon, health, sight, and knowledge are good both in themselves and for their consequences. The consequences of being healthy are that people find you attractive, you are capable of engaging in various activities, you are able to live free from pain, and so on. The consequences of having sight range from avoiding collisions to enjoying beautiful objects. Knowledge is likewise useful for accomplishing tasks. This much seems uncontroversial. But are health, sight, and knowledge also valuable in themselves? Knowledge for its own sake seems simple enough: sports fans will spend considerable energy exploring players’ statistics for no practical purpose. They simply enjoy knowing about sports. What about health?

If you could have all the consequences of health but not actually be healthy, would you choose to be that way? Given advances in medicine, this is becoming more and more possible. Rather than spend time at the gym, you can get silicone muscle implants, which increase the apparent strength of muscles while compromising their actual function. Rather than controlling your diet, you can undergo liposuction. Rather than getting a natural dopamine release from exercise, you can stimulate brain chemistry through drugs. Rather than getting a general sense of energy and well-being from cardiovascular health, you can take stimulants to get through the day. Rather than getting a good night’s sleep from having taxed your body through exercise, you can counteract your stimulants with alcohol and sleeping pills. This might be hard on your liver, but there are treatments for that as well. In short, if you could look, feel, and act just as a healthy person can but without being healthy, would you do it?²

The point of all of this is to lay out the driving question: What kind of good is justice (358b)? Glaucon personally thinks that justice is a middle sort of good (good both in itself and for its consequences), yet he is afraid that most people think that justice, like medicine, is good only for its consequences. He therefore challenges Socrates to explain (a) what justice and injustice are, (b) what power each has in the soul, and (c) why justice is a good in itself and not only for its consequences (366d-367e). To drive home what he is after, and what Socrates is up against, Glaucon sets out how “most people” would respond to this challenge (358d-362c).

Justice, according to this account, is simply an agreement people make not to harm each other. No one seeks justice willingly. To prove it, Glaucon offers a thought experiment: a shepherd, ancestor to Gyges, king of Lydia, finds a magic ring that makes him invisible (359e-360e).³ Making use of this, he sleeps with the king’s wife, kills the king, and takes over the kingdom. If you had an invisibility ring, would you still play by the rules? If you could act unjustly without suffering the consequences, would you do it? Glaucon drives the point home: If you had the choice between being just but seeming unjust (and thus suffering the consequences of being seen as unjust) and being unjust but seeming just (and thus reaping the rewards of being seen as just), which would you choose? Glaucon’s brother, Adeimantus, takes it a step further, pointing out that acting unjustly helps one make money, which can be used to bribe people and gods alike (362d-367e). If that sounds right to you, then clearly you do not value justice for itself, only for its consequences.⁴ With this, the challenge is set.

“We Built This City”: Republic 2 (368–374)

Up to this point, we have been talking about the justice and injustice in individual people. Socrates sets out his strategy, which is to step back and look for justice and injustice on a larger scale: a city. Once that has been described, he will return to the original task of seeking something analogous in an individual’s character/soul (368a-369b). This is a heuristic strategy: it is not that justice in the soul will be a certain way because justice in the city is a certain way. Rather, finding justice in the city will give us a set of questions to ask and ideas to work with as we examine the soul. This task takes up the next two and a half books.

The first stage is to imagine a healthy city (369b-372d), small in scale, catering to simple desires, lacking delicacies, and self-sufficient as a community. Such a place is apparently too bland for Athenian sensibilities. Glaucon calls it a “city of pigs” (372d). Socrates responds by presenting a “city with a fever” (373a-383c). This is large scale and caters to refined desires with various luxuries. Maintaining this fever will require constant expansion into neighboring territories, so he adds a professional military called guardians. Along the way, Socrates introduces a principle of specialization: since it is impossible for one person to practice many crafts well, each person should do what he or she is best suited to by nature (369d-370c). Glaucon agrees, so Socrates concludes that the guardians should constitute a professional army (374c).

Plato’s Early Curriculum: Republic 2 and 3 (374–417)

The rest of book 2 and most of book 3 are occupied with the education of the guardian class. The first thing they need to be is brave and spirited (375b). In English, the lines between spiritual, spirited, and spirit can be blurry. In Greek, the terms psychē, thymos, and daimōn are clearly distinct. To explain what is meant by “spirited,” Socrates offers dogs as an example. When attacked, dogs will fight back as needed. This, however, creates a puzzle (375b-376b): a successful guardian will have to be gentle toward the people he protects and high-spirited (megalothymos) toward his enemies. How can these opposing character traits exist in the same person at once? Dogs prove another useful example, as they can be fiercely loyal but also fierce toward attackers. Furthermore, dogs tend to be gentle toward people they know and aggressive toward people they do not know. Socrates sees this as a love of knowledge, which clearly marks out dogs as the most philosophical of animals. While he is likely joking, Socrates here makes the serious point that guardians must be raised to behave like his furry philosophers.

For the guardians’ training, Socrates looks to Greece’s traditional form of early education: music (musikē) and gym training (gymnastikē; 376e). Music in this context includes anything involving a Muse: singing, playing instruments, poetry, theater, literature, and so on.⁵ The rest of book 2 (376e-383c) is taken up with what the content of this musical education should be. In particular, it sets out what poets should not say about the gods: that they act immorally or that they change their forms. Anyone familiar with Greek mythology knows that the traditional gods do a lot of both. Zeus, for instance, pursues extramarital affairs by changing into a bull, swan, eagle, cloud, and shower of gold. Socrates’s discussion of poetry spills over into book 3, as he discusses what we should not say about mortals: that death is evil and ought to be feared (386a-388a), that excess and indulgence are good (389d-392a), and that unjust people are happy (392b-c). The goal of all this is to raise children to be brave, disciplined, and just. While that sounds like a fine thing, it rules out the vast majority of Homer’s and Hesiod’s poetry, which were the foundation of Greece’s traditional musical education.

Having dealt with content, Socrates moves on to style. The first point is that young people acting in plays should portray only suitable role models. If such roles are not available, they should merely narrate actions (392c-398c). Socrates then turns to questions of music theory (398c-403c). Rather than getting bogged down in technical details, he looks to the moral point: children should be raised listening to whatever rhythms and harmonies will make them brave and disciplined. Furthermore, music will help children develop a sense of grace and wholeness. That way, when they encounter something that is malformed, even if they cannot articulate what is wrong with it (that comes later in the curriculum), they will have an intuitive sense that something is off (401e-402a). This goes beyond just music to include instances of virtue and vice. The truly musical person, it turns out, will be a lover of the fine and beautiful (402d), which is the real point of all of this.

Athletic training also pursues a moral goal, as it arouses the spirited aspect of the soul, which will make people brave (410). This, in turn, “harmonizes” with the sense of grace imbued by music (411a). Socrates warns against pursuing one to the exclusion of the other: music alone can make people too soft; athletics alone can make them brutish and harsh. What we need is a balance of the two (410a-412b): the harmony of grace and power that rowers like to talk about.⁶ While we might assume that athletic training is for the body and music for the soul (376e), it turns out that the main aim of both is character formation (410b-c). A healthy body does not make a healthy soul but vice versa (403d). What kind of athletic regimen creates a healthy soul? Socrates warns against overspecialization. Professional athletes, he argues, sleep their lives away, and do not deal well with changes in diet (404a). Wartime conditions are better: soldiers have simple diets and are generally fit, even if they occasionally need medical treatment (404b-405a). Thus, just as music has two parts (content and style), so too does athletic training (exercise and diet).⁷ All four work together to get children’s characters into shape.

US culture has come to see education as a private commodity rather than a public good. It was not always that way. Thomas Jefferson argued that the United States needed a school within walking distance of any house. His rationale was that the country needed a “natural aristocracy,” in which the people who were best suited to rule would. For this to happen, children needed access to education. The alternative, he warned, was an “unnatural aristocracy,” in which rulers were chosen on the basis of birth or their parents’ wealth, as in the case of the upper classes of Europe. Given college admission scandals (to say nothing of the SAT prep classes that wealthy parents use to help their children get ahead), it is unclear how well we are living up to Jefferson’s ideal.⁸

Socrates ends on a Jeffersonian note, arguing that certain members of the future guardian class will rise to the top as being particularly good at always doing what they believe to be best for the city. These will be elevated as the “complete guardians,” while their classmates will be assigned as their “helpers/auxiliaries” (412b-417a). With this, the city will settle into three classes: the producers (farmers, shoemakers, merchants, and so on), the auxiliaries (army/police), and the “complete guardians” (rulers). To buttress these class divisions, Socrates invents a myth according to which people have various metals in their blood: gold, silver, iron, and bronze. Guardians will be raised to think that since they have gold in their blood, it is wrong for them to have it in their pockets. This bit of social engineering is meant to raise a class of rulers who shun personal monetary gain and think first about the good of the whole.

Justice as Civic and Mental Health: Republic 4

In looking for justice, Socrates reiterates that the goal in building the ideal city is to make the city as a whole, not just a part of it, as happy as possible (420). This will make it “one city” rather than what we usually find: a city in which the rich and the poor are effectively distinct political entities set against each other (421–427). Socrates suggests that we can avoid this problem through the ruling classes’ voluntary poverty and commitment to the values instilled by their early education. They must always put the city first. To help ensure this, the city will devise marriage contracts within the ruling class and provide for the education of future generations (423e-424a).

What then is the justice of this city? Plato approaches this question holistically, looking to his ideal city for four of the virtues that Socrates called into question in his dialogues set in gyms. The wisdom of a city sits in the knowledge of guardians, who make decisions based on a holistic view of the city’s well-being. The bravery of a city sits in its auxiliaries, who hold to the values instilled by their early education. What is the virtue particular to the productive class? It does not have one. Rather, discipline/moderation is obtained by the three classes working together harmoniously: the guardians rule, the auxiliaries help them rule, and the productive class submits to being ruled. Justice, it turns out, has been on the table for some time in the principle of specialization, that each person should do what he or she is best suited to by nature: guardians should rule, auxiliaries should assist the guardians, and producers should submit to their rulers’ orders.

Is this remotely plausible? Socrates does not seem to mind if people move around within the productive class: if you start out a farmer but learn you would rather be a blacksmith, then do it. Similarly, there are mechanisms for moving around people who have been incorrectly classed—for instance, a potential guardian born to parents of the productive class. For a city to flourish, however, the people making money must be distinct from the people making policy. If you want to make money, that is fine. You can do that, but you will not be put in charge of the government. If you want to be in charge, that is fine too. You will simply take a vow of poverty. If you want to be in the army, that is also fine. You will take a vow of poverty and a vow of obedience to those higher up the chain.

With this account of civic virtue set out, Socrates is ready to examine justice in the individual soul. The account of civic justice suggests that it will have something to do with how the parts of one’s soul relate to one another. The first step, then, is to look for analogous parts within the soul. For this, Socrates looks to instances of inner conflict.

Recall a time when you knew better but did something anyway. Perhaps it is the one more round you know you will regret in the morning or that piece of cake that will cost you sprints the next day. Why do we act against our own best judgment? Socrates’s analysis is that the rational part of your soul is in conflict with its appetitive part. Most of us will accept the idea that we have appetites for physical pleasure, which sometimes conflict with our rational understanding of overall goods. But what about times when you do something that is just tasteless, and get mad at yourself for it? Socrates’s example is looking at corpses. While this might have sexual overtones in an Athenian context, we could think about rubbernecks on the interstate who stare at car crashes. Such ogling is not wrong or harmful, just tasteless. Socrates concludes that in such cases the conflict is between appetite and our “spirited” part. To back his conclusion that this is not another instance of appetite or reason, he points to dogs and babies, who lack reason but abound in spirit. The dog example is, once again, informative. As pack animals, dogs care about issues of social standing: alphas, betas, protecting one’s own, avenging slights, and so on. On Socrates’s analysis, our spirited part is similarly keyed to issues of social standing and honor.⁹

If reason, spirit, and appetite are the soul’s parts, what are its virtues? Using civic virtue as a model, Socrates suggests individual wisdom is the rational part’s knowledge of the soul’s overall good. Individual courage is the spirited part’s holding to the mandates of reason. Individual discipline/moderation comes about when reason rules appetite, and spirit assists. Individual justice is each part doing its own work: reason ruling, spirit helping, appetites submitting to being ruled. What does this look like in practice? When you think clearly about the consequences of that extra round (reason), then you should not give in to your desire for it (appetite); rather, you should feel ashamed of being the sort of person who does that sort of thing, and take pride in doing what is best for you overall (spirit).

What is the alternative? If you put spirit in charge over reason, you become a hothead who flies off the handle at any perceived social slight. If you put appetite in charge, you will go for short-term and easy pleasures at the expense of what is best for you overall, appetites included. According to this line of thought, the way to balance our various desires and live our best lives is to use our reason and live like human beings. That is what justice is. At this point, Socrates has everything he needs to construct a response to Glaucon’s challenge: justice is a kind of mental health understood in Hippocratic terms of harmony and balance. While all agree that justice is good for its consequences, Socrates must show that it is also good in itself. His definition of justice and the other virtues effectively reframes the question: If you did not have to worry about the consequences, would you rather be mentally healthy or mentally ill?¹⁰