Republic outline and book IV and the search for justice and moderation and wisdom and courage and justice

The beautiful or happy city, which S has been constructing since the middle of Book II, is now complete. The musical/poetic training of the guardians has been described. The guardians have been divided into the classes of rulers and auxiliaries. They must live a kind of "blended" life, with wholesome stories and poems complementing physical training (though Plato doesn't describe the daily "workout" with much precision). Once the city is fully formed, then, the task shifts to trying to find justice in this city and then projecting the justice found out there back to a justice found in the soul. This essay moves us from the final establishment of the city to the definition of justice.

The Kallipolis Established: Searching for the Cardinal Virtues

The city has been established (427d). The next thing to do is to call upon all the interlocutors "so as to look inside it and see where the justice and the injustice might be in it" (id.). S states that the city, if correctly founded, must also be completely good and, if completely good, then "wise, courageous, moderate, and just" (427e). These are the four Greek cardinal virtues, which already, in Plato's time, were said to the the measure of the ethical person. Since the city is good it must have these virtues in it, and S supposes that by looking for one of the virtues, one might find the others also (428a). So, he begins with the virtue of wisdom. Such a completely good city is wise, because it has good judgment (428b), which is "clearly some kind of knowledge." (Id.) But, whose knowledge makes the city wise? That of the carpenter? No. The worker in bronze? No. It is those who have knowledge that doesn't "judge about any particular matter but about the city as a whole and the maintenance of good relations, both internally and with other cities" (428d). The guardians are the only ones with this kind of knowledge (428d-e).

Searching for Other Virtues

With one virtue having been found rather easily, the search is now on for courage. Where is courage to be found in our city? (428b). A natural answer presents itself: "Who....would look anywhere other than to the part of it that fights and does battle on its behalf?" (428b). No one, of course. What is this power or virtue of courage and how is the city courageous? It is courageous because of "a part of itself that has the power to preserve through everything its belief about what things are to be feared" (428c). S further explains that courage is a kind of preservation (Id.), the maintenance of a belief [i.e., that the city is to be guarded and protected] against all comers. In other words, this belief will be preserved and not abandoned "because of pains, pleasures, desires, or fears" (428d).

He then gives a memorable image taken from dyeing. Just as a dyers who want to dye wool purple choose wool that is naturally white and dye it in a way that the color becomes fast, so the city must make sure that this class (the soldiers) "absorb the laws in the finest possible way, just like a dye, so that their belief about what they shoudl fear and all the rest would become so fast that even such extremely effective detergents as pleasure, pain, fear, and desire wouldn't wash it out" (430a). After this explanation, S mentions that what he has described was "civil courage" (in contradistinction to battle courage, I suppose--430c).

Where, Oh Where, is Moderation?

The interlocutors debate among themselves which virtue next to seek, moderation or justice, and they decide on the former. So, S quickly gives a definition of moderation--"more like a kind of consonance and harmony than the previous ones" (430e). S goes on. "Moderation is surely a kind of order, the mastery of certain kinds of pleasures and desires" (430e). Others use the world "self-control" to express what is meant, and even though S ridicules the term he recognizes its value because it points to the fact that within the soul there is a better and a worse part, and the control of the worse by the better is, then, moderation. He will return to "parts" of the soul later in the book. So, where the better rules the worse in the city, you have moderation.

S then explains himself by an example that will be offensive to our ears today. There are "diverse" desires in the city, "mostly in children, women, household slaves...," and there are "simple" desires that are measured and directed in accordance with understanding (431c). Since in the beautiful city the desires of the many are controlled by the wisdom and desires of the few, it will be a moderate city. Moderation, therefore, is located in both the rulers and the ruled when there is agreement in the way the city is organized. "Then, you can see how right we were to divine that moderation resembles a kind of harmony?" (431e). Unlike courage and wisdom, then, which each resided in their own respective groups in the city, "moderation spreads throughout the whole" (432a). All the people "sing the same song together" (Id.).

Finally, Where's Justice?

Now the moment of truth has come. They are ready to find justice. But they must invoke the gods to aid them in the search because the path to justice still seems to be "impenetrable and full of shadows" (432c). Then S spotted the "track" of something, concluding that their "quarry won't altogether escape us" (432d). And, as is so often the case, the thing most sought is lying right there at their feet. "Just as people sometimes search for the very thing they are holding in their hands, so we didn't look n the right direction but gazed off into the distance, and that's probably why we didn't notice it" (432e).

This long and dramatically pleasing prelude brings us to S's definition of justice: "Justice, I think, is exactly what we said must be established througout the city...." It presupposes that everyone must have his/her own occupation.

"Then, it turns out that this doing one's own work--provided that it comes to be in a certain way--is justice" (433b).

Socrates goes on:

"I think that this is what was left over in the city when moderation, courage, and wisdom have been found. It is the power that makes it possible for them to grow in the city and that preserves them when they've grown for as long as it remains there itself" (433c).

With this definition of justice on the table (is it anticlimactic for you?), we must see how he applies it to the life of the individual.

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