The Idea of Virtue in Antiquity (I): Plato (C)
In Plato’s Republic, we have previously seen that Socrates’ first deduction from the interlocutors’ presumably faultless construction of the ideal city-state is that such a city-state is wise, brave, temperate, and just (Book IV: 427e). The guardians, warriors, and producers are as perfect as their city; and the social classes of an ideal city-state function harmoniously together. Socrates has just gone down a “check list” establishing that these four virtues are indeed present in the ideal city.
Socrates and Glaucon now summarize the characteristics of the social classes by asking which contributes most to making the city good (433c): unanimity between rulers and ruled (an aspect of soberness), holding fast to lawfully mandated convictions about things to be feared (courage), intelligence residing in the guardians (wisdom), or the principle (justice) of not being a gadfly or busybody. They agree on the difficulty of preferring one principle to another. One notes in passing that it is just this “gadfly” characteristic that became a major factor leading to Socrates’ drinking of a fatal beverage (hemlock).
In 435b-c, Socrates notes that a just man will not differ from a just city in respect of the form of justice. Now the just city was thought to be just because its producers, warriors, and guardians all performed their characteristic functions, and only those functions. The just city is thereby sober, brave and wise by inclination (affections) and habit. By analogy, Socrates expects the soul of an individual also to have certain affections and habits that allow harmonious operation of the three-fold faculties of the soul: intellect, will (or desire), and emotion (436a).
Justice in the soul is not connected with doing one’s own business externally, but with regard to that which is within one’s self (443c-444c). It is intolerable for one faculty to expropriate the business of a different faculty in the same person. One must attain to self-mastery and beautiful order within oneself; and, after having harmonized these principles (faculties), one becomes a self-controlled personality instead of a locus for many conflicting personalities that emerge from time to time. The just and honorable action is that which preserves and helps to produce this condition of soul. Wisdom is the science which presides over such conduct, while injustice tends to overthrow the spiritual constitution into brutish ignorance. Injustice is a kind of civil war between the principles or faculties of the soul, resulting in licentiousness, cowardice, brutish ignorance, and turpitude.
Healthful things (overt, just actions in the external world) engender health (a disposition of the just soul); and disease-bearing things (overt, unjust actions in the external world) engender disease (a disposition of the unjust soul). In other words, virtue is the habit of doing good (or doing the right thing easily and with pleasure); and vice is the habit of doing evil. In 444e Socrates concludes that virtue is a kind of health, beauty, and good condition of the soul; whereas vice is disease, ugliness, and weakness of the soul.
In 448c-d, Socrates mentions that there exists one form of excellence in political constitution (the ideal city-state, delineated in Books I - IV and referred to as aristocratic; unless there is only one guardian, in which case it is referred to as royal). In addition, there is a quasi-infinite number of evil forms of constitution with various degrees of depravity, among which four stand out. We do not learn the names of these four additional types of constitution until Book VIII, 544a-e. The five types of constitution, in Plato’s order of increasing defect, are aristocracy (government by the best [best-born or noblest]), timocracy (government by the most honorable), oligarchy (government by the few [wealthiest]), democracy (government by the people), and tyranny (government by the worst). One notes in passing that animus against King George III led to the proscription against nobility in the U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 9, Clause 8. Further constitutional analysis is beyond the scope of this series of blog postings. Our investigation of Books I - IV is now complete.
Later (not in Plato’s time), some contingent or secondary, personal virtues were proposed. These secondary virtues were said to be related to, or hinged together with, the four so-called “cardinal virtues” that were identified by Plato: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. For example, there are secondary virtues of liberality (free spending, but of whose money?), magnanimity (good works, but at whose expense?), magnificence (hyper-liberality), friendliness, truthfulness, ready wit, and some measure of ambition. There are virtues corresponding to the opposites of the medieval Seven Deadly Sins: pride, greed, anger, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. There are even other vices that come to mind, such as vanity, shame, and grandiosity (pretentiousness); all of which presumably have opposites as secondary virtues.
Synonyms abound for the cardinal virtues: They may be referred to, respectively, as practical wisdom or choosing prudently; possessing courage, fortitude, or endurance; being temperate, moderate, sober, or self-disciplined; and giving to others their due (what they have earned). That which is earned may be payment to a creditor; allegiance to the government; honor to the Greek gods or, later, to God himself; or punishment meted out to a criminal.
Summary and Conclusions: Justice is harmony and healthy functioning among the classes of a Platonic society (guardians, warriors, and producers) or among the competing faculties (intellect, will or desire, and emotions) in the soul of an individual human person. One might say that justice occurs whenever each class maintains its own prerogatives or whenever each individual - - receiving his or her own due - - proceeds to do his or her own task.
Virtue is a kind of health of the soul, in which the performance of the tasks set for classes - - to the extent that classes can be said, metaphorically, to have souls - - or the tasks set for individuals are accomplished efficiently, easily, and with pleasure. Plato described healthy virtue as a kind of beauty and good condition of the soul; while vice is disease, ugliness, and weakness. A person’s happiness results from a life devoted to knowledge, virtue, and the self-fulfillment found while pursuing the good and eschewing ephemeral pleasures.
Aristotle acknowledged the verbal agreement that happiness is the attainment of the chief good; and, further, that “human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there is more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete” [Nico. Eth., Bk. I, Ch. 7]. Aristotle’s view of ethics is usually summed up as “Virtue is right action done easily and with pleasure.”
Why should a person or city-state be just? The highest faculty of a rational animal is self-evidently the intellect; hence, the greatest happiness of an individual human person is found in the intellectual contemplation of the Platonic Forms of the true, the beautiful, and the good. Such contemplation is facilitated by a mind that is just, i.e., harmonious and healthy. Among the guardians called to their special task, the greatest happiness is administering a just city-state, in which there is no conflict between the classes of guardians, warriors, and producers; and no impediments to economic prosperity and security.
The modern reader is struck by the insightful Socratic distinction, in Book I: 354b, between “what justice is” (regarding its essential nature) and “something about justice” (regarding its possible description as virtue or vice). At that point, Socrates says that “the present outcome of the discussion is that I know nothing. For if I don’t know what the just [or justice] is, I shall hardly know whether it [justice] is a virtue or not, and whether its possessor is or is not happy.”
The present writer would characterize Socrates’ problem in the preceding paragraph as stemming from his twin intuitions that justice must indeed refer somehow to virtue; but that virtues are often means between extremes, leading to unacceptable imprecision in the notion of justice. Only by working out, during the dialogs in Books I - IV of the Republic, that there is a higher-order nature of justice; i.e., that justice is the harmony and smooth functioning of the different classes in a city-state or of the different faculties of an individual human soul, can the notion of justice be adequately specified. The successful city-state depends on the agreement of guardians, warriors, and producers. The successful individual human person depends on the agreement of his or her intellect, will or desire, and emotions.
As a penultimate observation, one notes that Plato had no way to anticipate future societies that would become so wealthy that four classes of individuals would arise: not only rulers, warriors, and producers, but also a class that might be named “equity warriors.” This new class is composed of critics and bureaucrats whose raison d’etre is to provide rationales for redistributing resources among individuals and groups on some basis other than merit. Intrepid equity warriors destroy previous norms of “equality of opportunity,” replace them with new norms of “equality of outcome,” and confer upon the new norms the Orwellian title, “equity.” One thinks in this regard of the multitudes of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) officers in modern universities.
Finally, at the societal level, Plato saw justice as harmony among classes, whose members were not busybodies, i.e., did not interfere in what other members had coming due as their earnings. He would have viewed medieval “trial by combat” or the Hobbesian “war of all against all” as standing in dire need of more rational proceedings based the concept of justice as distribution of “what is earned.” The specter of the equality of outcome, superseding the equality of opportunity, has the potential to destroy the notion of “earnings,” to reignite the war of all against all, to extirpate the Platonic quest for justice in the city-state or nation, to suppress the intellectual virtues required for free academic inquiry, and to vitiate the individual’s pursuit of the four-fold cardinal virtues.