But now we have to look for justice. Find the other three cardinal
virtues first, and then justice will be distinguishable. Wisdom is in
the guardians; if they be wise, the whole state will be wise. Courage we
find in the soldiers; courage is the true estimate of danger, and that
has been ingrained in them by their education. Temperance, called
mastery of self, is really the mastery of the better over the baser
qualities; as in our state the better class controls the inferior.
Temperance would seem to lie in the harmonious inter-relation of the
different classes. Obviously, the remaining virtue of the state is the
constant performance of his own particular function in the state, and
not his neighbour's, by each member of the state. Let us see how that
works out in the individual.
Shall we not find that there are three several qualities in the
individual, each of which must in like manner do its own business, the
intellectual, the passionate or spirited, and the lustful? They must be
separate, because one part of a thing cannot be doing contradictory
things at the same time; your lusts bid you do what your intelligence
forbids; and the emotional quality is distinct from both desire and
reason, though in alliance with reason. Well, here you have wisdom and
courage in the intellectual and spiritual parts, temperance in their
mastery over desire; and justice is the virtue of the soul as a whole;
of each part never failing to perform its own function and that alone.
To ask, now, whether justice or injustice is the more profitable becomes
ridiculous.
Now we shall find that virtue is one, but that vice has several forms;
as there is but one form of perfect state--ours--whether it happens to
be called a monarchy if there be but one guardian, or an aristocracy if
there be more; and, as it has four principal imperfect forms, so there
are four main vices.
Here Glaucon and Adeimantus refused to let me go on; I had shirked a
serious difficulty. What about women and children? My saying that the
soldiers were to live in common might mean anything. What kind of
communism was I demanding? Well, there are two different questions: What
is desirable? And, What is possible? First, then, our defenders are our
watch-dogs. Glaucon knows all about dogs; we don't differentiate in the
case of males and females; the latter hunt with the pack. If women are
similarly to have the same employments as men, they must have the same
education in music and gymnastic. We must not mind ribald comments. But
should they share masculine employments? Do they differ from men in such
a way that they should not? Women bear children, and men beget them; but
apart from that the differences are really only in degrees of capacity,
not essential distinctions of quality; even as men differ among
themselves. The natures being the same, the education must be the same,
and the same careers must be open.
But a second and more alarming wave threatens us: Community of wives and
children. "You must prove both the possibility and desirability of
that." Men and women must be trained together and live together, but not
in licentiousness. They must be mated with the utmost care for
procreation, the best being paired at due seasons, nominally by lot, and
for the occasion. The offspring of the selected will have a common
nursery; the mothers will not know which were their own children.
Parentage will be permissible only between twenty-five and fifty-five,
and between twenty and forty. The children begotten in the same batch of
espousals will be brothers and sisters.
The absence of "mine" and "thine" will ensure unity, because it
abolishes the primary cause of discord; common maintenance by the state
removes all temptation either to meanness or cringing. Our guardians
will be uncommonly happy. As to practicability: communism is suitable
for war. The youngsters will be taken to watch any fighting; cowards
will be degraded; valour will be honoured, and death on the field, with
other supreme services to the state, will rank the hero among demigods.
Against Greeks war must be conducted as against our own kith and kin.
But as to the possibility of all this--this third threatening wave is
the most terrific of all.
_IV.--Of Philosophy in Rulers_
It will be possible then, and only then, when kings are philosophers or
philosophers kings. "You will be mobbed and pelted for such a
proposition." Still, it is the fact. The philosopher desires all
knowledge. You know that justice, beauty, good, and so on, are single,
though their presentation is multiplex and variable. Curiosity about the
multiplex particulars is not desire of knowledge, which is of the one
constant idea--of that which is, as ignorance is of that which is not.
What neither is nor is not, that which fluctuates and changes, is the
subject matter of opinion, a state between knowledge and ignorance.
Beauty is beauty always and everywhere; the things that look beautiful
may be ugly from another point of view. Experience of beautiful things,
curiosity about them, must be distinguished from knowledge of beauty;
the philosopher is not to be confounded with the connoisseur, not
knowledge with opinion. The philosopher is he who has in his mind the
perfect pattern of justice, beauty, truth; his is the knowledge of the
eternal; he contemplates all time and all existence; no praises are too
high for his character. "No doubt; still, if that is so, why do
professed philosophers always show themselves either fools or knaves in
ordinary affairs?" A ship's crew which does not understand that the art
of navigation demands a knowledge of the stars, will stigmatise a
properly qualified pilot as a star-gazing idiot, and will prevent him
from navigating. The world assumes that the philosopher's abstractions
are folly, and rejects his guidance. The philosopher is the best kind of
man; the corrupted philosopher is the worst; and the corrupted
influences brought to bear are irresistible to all but the very
strongest natures. The professional teachers of philosophy live not by
leading popular opinion, but by pandering to it; a bastard brood trick
themselves out as philosophers, while the true philosopher withdraws
himself from so gross a world. Small wonder that philosophy gets
discredited! Not in the soil of any existing state can philosophy grow
naturally; planted in a suitable state, her divinity will be apparent.
I need no longer hesitate to say that we must make our guardians
philosophers. The necessary combination of qualities is extremely rare.
Our test must be thorough, for the soul must be trained up by the
pursuit of all kinds of knowledge to the capacity for the pursuit of the
highest--higher than justice and wisdom--the idea of the good. "But what
is the good--pleasure, knowledge?" No. To see and distinguish material
things, the faculty of sight requires the medium of light, whose source
is the sun. The good is to the intellectual faculty what the sun is to
that of vision: it is the source and cause of truth, which is the light
whereby we perceive ideas; it is not truth nor the ideas, but above
them; their cause, as the sun is the source of light and the cause of
growth.
Again, as the material things with which the eye is concerned are in two
categories--the copies, reflections or shadows of things, and actual
things--correspondingly the things perceived by the intellect are in a
secondary region--as the mathematical--where everything is derived from
hypotheses which are assumed to be first principles; or in a supreme
region, in which hypotheses are orly the steps by which we ascend to the
real ultimate first principles themselves. And it will follow further
that the mind has four faculties appropriate to these four divisions,
which we call respectively pure reason (the highest), understanding,
conviction, and perception of shadows; the first pair being concerned
with being, the field of the intellect; the second pair with becoming,
the field of opinion.
_V.--Of Shadows and Realities_
Let me speak a parable. Humanity--ourselves--are as people dwelling ever
bound and fettered in a twilit cave, with our backs to the light. Behind
us is a parapet, and beyond the parapet a fire; all that we see is the
shadows thrown on the wall that faces us by figures passing along the
parapet behind us; all we hear is the echo of their voices. Now, if some
of us are turned round to face the light and look on the real figures,
they will be dazzled at first, and much more if they are taken out into
the light, and up to face the sun himself; but presently they will see
perfectly, and have all the joy thereof. Now send them back into the
cave, and they will be apparently much blinder than the folk who have
been there all the time, and their talk of what they have seen will be
taken for the babbling of fools, or worse. Small wonder that those who
have beheld the light have but little mind to return to the twilight
cave which is the common world. But remember--everyone in the cave
possesses the faculty of sight if only his eyes be turned to the light.
Loose the fetters of carnal desires which hold him with his back to the
light, and every man _may_ be converted and live. So we must select
those who are most capable of facing the light, and see to it that they
return to the cave, to give the cave-dwellers the benefit of their
knowledge. And if this be for them a hardship, we must bear in mind as
before, that the good of the whole is what matters, not whether one or
another may suffer hardship for the sake of the whole.
How, then, shall we train them to the passage from darkness to light?
For this, our education in music and gymnastic is wholly inadequate. We
must proceed first to the science of numbers, then of geometry, then of
astronomy. And after astronomy, there is the sister science of abstract
harmonics--not of audible sounds. All of which are but the prelude to
the ultimate supreme science of dialectic, which carries the
intelligence to the contemplation of the idea of the good, the ultimate
goal. And here to attempt further explanation would be vanity. This is
the science of the pure reason, the coping-stone of knowledge.
We saw long ago that our rulers must possess every endowment of mind and
body, all cultivated to the highest degree. From the select we must
again select, at twenty, those who are most fit for the next ten years'
course of education; and from them, at thirty, we shall choose those who
can, with confidence, be taken to face the light; who have been tested
and found absolutely steadfast, not shaken by having got beyond the
conventional view of things. We will give them five or six years of
philosophy; then fifteen years of responsible office in the state; and
at fifty they shall return to philosophy, subject to the call upon them
to take up the duties of rulership and of educating their successors.
_VI.--Of State Types and Individual Types_
Before this digression we were on the point of discussing the four
vitiated forms of the state, and the corresponding individual types. The
four types of state as we know them in Hellas, are: the Spartan, where
personal ambition and honour rule, which we call timocracy; the
oligarchical, where wealth rules; the democratic; and the arbitrary rule
of the individual, which we call tyranny. The comparison of this
last--the supremely unjust--with our own--the supremely just--will show
whether justice or injustice be the more desirable.
The perfect state degenerates to timocracy when the state's numerical
law of generation [an unsolved riddle] has not been properly observed,
and inferior offspring have entered in consequence into the ruling body.
The introduction of private property will cause them to assume towards
the commonalty the attitude, not of guardians, but of masters, and to be
at odds among themselves; also, in their education gymnastic will
acquire predominance over music. Ambition and party spirit become the
characteristic features. When, in an ill-ordered state a great man
withdraws from the corruption of politics into private life, we see the
corresponding individual type in the son of such a one, egged on by his
mother and flattering companions, to win back for himself at all costs
the prestige which his father had resigned; personal ambition becomes
his dominant characteristic.
Oligarchy is the next outcome of the introduction of private property;
riches outweigh virtue, love of money the love of honour, and the rich
procure for themselves the legal monopoly of political power. Here the
state becomes divided against itself--there is one state of the rich and
another of the poor--and the poor will be divided into the merely
incompetent and the actively dangerous or predatory. And your
corresponding individual is he whose father had won honours which had
not saved him from ultimate ruin; so that the son rejects ambition and
makes money his goal, till, for the sake of money, he will compass any
baseness, though still only under a cloak of respectability.
In the oligarchy the avaricious encourage and foster extravagance in
their neighbours. Men, ruined by money-lenders, turn on their moneyed
rulers, overthrow them, and give everyone a share in the government. The
result is that the state is not one, nor two, but diverse. Folk say what
they like and do what they like, and anyone is a statesman who will wave
the national flag. That is democracy. Such is the son of your miserly
oligarch; deprived of unnecessary pleasures, he is tempted to wild
dissipation. He has no education to help him to distinguish, and the
vices of dissipation assume the aspect and titles of virtue. He
fluctuates from one point of view to another--is one thing to-day and
another to-morrow.
And last we come to tyranny and the tyrannical man. Democratic license
develops into sheer anarchy. Jack is as good as his master. The
predatory population becomes demagogues; they squeeze the decent
citizens, and drive them to adopt oligarchical methods; then the friend
of the people appears; the protector, champion, and hero, by a familiar
process becomes a military autocrat, who himself battens, as must also
his mercenary soldiery, on the citizens; and our unhappy Demos finds
that it has jumped out of the reek into the fire. Now our democratical
man was swayed by the devices and moods of the moment; his son will be
swayed by the most irrational and most bestial of his appetites; be
bully and tyrant, while slave of his own lusts. Your thorough blackguard
of every species comes of this type, and the worst of all is he who
achieves the tyranny of a state. See, then, how, even as the tyrannic
state is the most utterly enslaved, so the tyrannic man is of all men
the least free; and, beyond all others, the tyrant of a state. He is
like a slave-owner, who is at the mercy of his slaves--the passions
which he must pamper, or die, yet cannot satisfy. Surely such an one is
the veriest slave--yea, the most wretched of men. It follows that he who
is the most complete opposite of the tyrant is the happiest--the
individual who corresponds to our state. Proclaim it, then, son of
Ariston, that the most just of men is he who is master of himself, and
is of all men the most miserable, whether gods and men recognise him or
no.
_VII.--Of the Happiness of the Just_
Now for a second proof. Three kinds of pleasure correspond to the three
elements of the soul--reason, spirit, desire. In each man one of the
three is in the ascendant. One counts knowledge vain in comparison with
the advantages of riches, another with those of honour; to the
philosopher only truth counts. But he is the only one of them who makes
his choice from experience of all three kinds. And he, the only
qualified judge, places the satisfaction of the spirit second, and of
desire lowest. And yet a third proof: I fancy the only quite real
pleasures are those of the philosopher. There is an intermediate state
between pleasure and pain. To pass into this from pleasure is painful,
and from pain is pleasurable. Now, the pleasures of the body are really
nothing more than reliefs from pains of one kind or another. And, next,
the pleasures of the soul, being of the eternal order, are necessarily
more real than those of the body, which are fleeting--in fact, mere
shadows of pleasure.
Much as I love and admire Homer, I think our regulations as to poetry
were particularly sound; but we must inquire further into the meaning of
imitation. We saw before that all particular things are the
presentations of some universal idea. There is one ultimate idea of bed,
or chair, or table. What the joiner makes is a copy of that. All ideas
are the creation of the master artificer, the demiurge; of his creations
all material things are copies. We can all create things in a way by
catching reflections of them in a mirror. But these are only copies of
particular things from one point of view, partial copies of copies of
the idea. Such precisely are the creations of the painter, and in like
manner of the poet. What they know and depict is not the realities, but
mere appearances. If the poets knew the realities they would have left
us something other than imitations of copies. Moreover, what they
imitate is not the highest but the lower; not the truth of reason, but
emotions of all sorts, which it should be our business not to excite but
to control and allay. So we continue to prohibit the poetry which is
imitation, however supreme, and allow only hymns to the gods, and
praises of great men. We must no more admit the allurements of poesy
than the attractions of ambition or of riches.
Greater far are the rewards of virtue than all we have yet shown; for an
immortal soul should heed nothing that is less than eternal. "What, is
the soul then immortal? Can you prove that?" Yes, of a surety. In all
things there is good and evil; a thing perishes of its own corruption,
not of the corruption of aught external to it. If disease or injury of
the body cannot corrupt the soul, _a fortiori_ they cannot slay it; but
injustice, the corruption of the soul, is not induced by injury to the
body. If, then, the soul be not destroyed by sin, nothing else can
destroy it, and it is immortal. The number of existing souls must then
be constant; none perish, none are added, for additional immortal souls
would have to come out of what is mortal, which is absurd. Now, hitherto
we have shown only that justice is in itself best for the soul, but now
we see that its rewards, too, are unspeakably great. The gods, to whom
the just are known, will reward them hereafter, if not here; and even in
this world they have the better lot in the long run. But of this nothing
is comparable to their rewards in the hereafter, revealed to us in the
mythos of Er, called the Armenian, whose body being slain in battle, his
soul was said to have returned to it from the under-world--renewing its
life--a messenger to men of what he had there beheld. For a thousand
years the souls, being judged, enjoyed or suffered a tenfold retribution
for all they had done of good or evil in this life, and some for a
second term, or it might be for terms without end. Then for the most
part they were given again, after the thousand years, a choice of
another lot on the earth, being guided therein by their experience in
their last life; and so, having drunk of the waters of forgetfulness,
came back to earth once more, unconscious of their past.
Let us, then, believing that the soul is indeed immortal, hold fast to
knowledge and justice, that it may be well with us both here and
hereafter.