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.

The Idea of Virtue in Antiquity (I): Plato (B)

In Plato’s Republic, we have seen in the previous blog posting in this series that Socrates plans to give an account of the origin and nature of an ideally constructed city in order to identify justice and virtue in both the city and, by analogy, in the individual human person.  In Book II: 369e - 371e, the origin of a city is said to be one man calling on another for service.  The real creator of a city will be a society’s needs for food, clothing, housing, etc.; for importing, exporting, ship-building, and merchandising businesses, etc.; for the efficiencies gained by individuals specializing on limited tasks; and for the wage earners who provide arduous, non-specialized physical labor.  All these services are performed by the producing class.  But where can injustice or injustice be found?  It is not clear that the interlocutors could find justice or injustice in a city moderately supplying its own requirements.  Thus, in 372e Socrates suggests that perhaps they should study the origin of the luxurious, “fevered” city.  Not only are luxury-goods producers, poets, and doctors necessary in the fevered city; but an army (373e - 374a) is also required to ward off the inevitable raiding parties that will eagerly set about to steal the luxury goods.

In Book II: 374d, Socrates says that, just as specialized occupations and vocational excellence originate in a city; the task of the state’s guardians (army) unfolds as the greatest of all tasks if the very existence of the city-state is to be preserved, and its luxury goods retained.  The guardians are initially thought of as the army, whose very existence will require significant training expenses to be paid for by the producing class (374e - 376c).  Moreover, who is there to lead the army and to rein-in its excesses?  There will have to be a ruling class of some type, also supported by the producing class.  Love of wisdom, high spirit, quickness and strength must exist in the nature of him who is to become a good and true guardian of the state (376c), whether in the ruling class or in the army.

Evidently, the ruling class will have to be distinguished from run-of-the mill guardians by virtue of its [the ruling class’s] breeding and education (376c - 382c).  Consistent with this distinction, a shift in terminology occurs: The guardians are now thought of as the ruling class, while the original army-guardians are now said to be the warrior class.  The warriors are sometimes said to be the “helpers” of the guardians - - but these “helpers” seem to be potentially much more aggressive and threatening to the integrity of the state than merely subservient helpers or advisors.

The character, education and training of the guardians (ruling class) are crucial for the state’s survival and flourishing (376c - 382c).  The stories told by speakers and poets to impressionable young guardians must conform to two norms, or canons: First, God must be represented as being the cause only of the good, and not of all things (380c).  Second, God is altogether simple and true in deed and word, and neither changes himself nor deceives others by visions or words or the sending of signs in waking or dreams (381e – 382a). 

A consideration of the curriculum for the education of the guardians leads to the Platonic version of “cancel culture” (Book III: 387b): If a poetic work negates or undermines the ideal of being more afraid of slavery than of death, then that poetic work shall be expunged from the poetic canon.  Musical education is “most sovereign,” because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inmost soul (401d), allowing the recognition of “the forms of soberness, courage, liberality, and high-mindedness, and all their kindred and their opposites, too” (402c).

Some of the guardians’ education is referred to as a “noble lie” (414b) or “a sort of Phoenician Tale” (414c): In the ideal city-state, the story should be promulgated that all members of the city-state are fashioned from elements of the earth and are ipso facto brothers.  However, the guardians receive an infusion of gold during their primordial development (414d - 415c); helpers of the guardians (warriors) receive silver; and farmers and craftsmen, et al. (productive workers) receive iron, and, depending on the translation, either brass [copper and zinc] or bronze [copper and tin].  These metals, although found among earthly elements and alloys, are said to infuse the soul of each individual; and, hence, to offer some early thoughts on the mind-body problem.  

Occasionally, the Phoenician Tale continues, the father of one metallurgical type may beget progeny of a different metallurgical type.  Each individual should be assigned to the social class corresponding to his own, naturally-occurring metallurgical type (415c), i.e., not necessarily to the type of his father.  Thus, there results a three-fold-stratified, Platonic society with upward and downward mobility according to “the metallurgy of procreation” and not to personal effort.  Rule is by the individuals (guardians) with the virtue-laden, golden souls originating from a golden earthly nature.  The guardians receive maintenance from the city-state, but in return the guardians may not possess private property or money in order to keep their focus on the good of the city-state (416c - 417b).

Adimantus interrupts the conversation (Book IV: 419a - 421c) to say that the guardians will not be very happy without private property and money; hence, they will not have the motivation to provide good service.  Socrates counters this objection by saying that no one should attach to the guardians a happiness that will draw them away from being truly good.  Each class should have its own characteristic happiness.  (This objection is also addressed later, in Book V: 465d - 466c, where the concept of the happiness accruing in a timocracy is mentioned: Honor in life and a worthy [state] burial at death should be sufficient.)

Socrates mentions wealth and poverty as factors that can corrupt even a craftsman, and as extremes that must be avoided (421d - 423b).  Adimantus objects that without wealth the city cannot pay for its military defense.  Socrates answers that disparities of wealth will demoralize any defense.  He also mentions that these problems only underscore the importance of education, nurture, and being sure that the modes of music are never disturbed so as to unsettle the “most fundamental political and social conventions” (423e – 424c).  Socrates now maintains that the ideal city’s construction is complete, and he is confident that it is rightly founded and completely good (427c-e).

As Socrates’ very first deduction from the premise that their constructed ideal city is perfectly good, he states that such a city is wise, brave, temperate, and just (Book IV: 427e).  Presumably this is because the guardians, warriors, and producers are as perfect as their city, and because in an ideal city these social classes function harmoniously together.  But to be sure of his analysis, Socrates goes down a check list of these four virtues in order to see that all are present in the ideal city. 

First, in 428a - 429a Socrates discovers practical wisdom in the city as arising from the wise counsel of guardians, whose good breeding and rigorous education are founded upon principles of nature.  

Second, in 429a - 430c Socrates finds bravery in the city as arising from a warrior class that has been trained in music and physical exercise, educated to receive the city’s laws like wool receives dye, and resolute in strong lawful belief about things to be or not to be feared (as in fearing slavery more than death).  

Third, in 430e - 432a Socrates sees soberness in the city as arising from the self-discipline of the producers but extending across all social classes, so that the worse part of the city, or of the individual, may be controlled by the better part.  Soberness is a kind of beautiful order and a continence of certain pleasures and appetites.  Soberness is a kind of harmony, the concord of the naturally superior and inferior as to who ought to rule.  (Soberness is also known as moderation or temperance.)

Finally, in 433a - 434c Socrates perceives justice as doing one’s business and not being a busy-body; i.e., performing exactly one social service for the state.  Interference among the three classes of rulers, warriors, and producers would be most injurious to the state and most unjust.

Next week we will conclude our rendition of Plato’s construction of the ideal city-state in the Republic, Books I - IV, and the implication of this construction for the idea of virtue in the ancient world.

The Idea of Virtue in Antiquity (I): Plato (A)

This blog posting is dedicated to the memory of Robert W. Bretzlaff (1918 - 1988), who was a master farmer in Champaign County, Illinois; who maintained interests in agriculture and civil engineering; and who held all matters of music and of the mind in high regard.  He would have been 105 years old as of the day of this posting, and he has been greatly missed.  From 1854 to the present day, from his predecessors Gustave and Henry W.; and to his successors Robert S., William S., Zachary J., and Ethan H.; this Bretzlaff line in the U.S.A. has greatly enjoyed the blessings of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - - and not even to mention the benefits of occasional blog postings!

In this blog posting (and its successors), we want to investigate the idea of virtue in Plato’s Republic (Books I - IV), which is famously centered on the idea of justice in a city-state.  For initial working definitions, let us assume that a virtue is a trait of excellence in action (moral virtue) or in thought (intellectual virtue); and that justice is the actual awarding to an individual human person of his due, or what he has earned, be it reward (distributive justice) or punishment (retributive justice).  There may be other traits besides justice that are virtues, as well as alternative definitions of justice.  Moreover, there might be disagreement regarding whether justice is properly predicated of individual human persons, of society at large, or of both.

Background regarding justice: Someone claiming proceeds from labor or capital might be told “Having been subsidized by good government, ‘you didn’t build that,’ meaning that you didn’t earn anything beyond the subsidy; and any continuing income stream accrues to the government!”  Someone requesting protection from illegal activity via the deterring effect of a criminal justice system might be told “Having been oppressed by bad government and evil victimizers, some individuals previously known as criminals have been recategorized as “the victimized”; whose conduct has been contextualized, and whose punishment has been cancelled!”  If such claims and requests are routinely denied, then, evidently, one would be forced either to abandon the possibility of justice or else to re-examine its underlying rationale.  Perhaps there are alternative ways to ground justice as rights and obligations pertaining to life, liberty, and property; and if so, then those rights and obligations must be secured by a sovereign who - - although striking terror into the minds of a rebellious populace - - can at least prevent life from becoming truly solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Plato’s dialog, the Republic, bears the title Politeia in transliterated Greek and De Republica in Latin.  The Latin title may also be rendered in English as “On the Public Thing” or “Public Affairs.”  The Republic examines the ethical questions: “What is virtue?” “What is justice?” and “Why should a person or city be just?” 

For a work widely known as a discussion of political theory, the Republic gets off to a somewhat surprising start: Socrates’ interlocutor, Cephalus, fields a question about the greatest benefit that accrues, in old age, from the possession of property (Book I: 330d - 331b).  Cephalus states that he is concerned about his personal fate in the afterlife.  Not being personally aware of any debt that he still owes to other individuals, to his city-state, or to the ancient Greek deities - - and evidently presupposing that unencumbered wealth is an independent, summary indicaton of being debt-free - - Cephalus hopes to attain to the poetic model of a man living out his days in justice and piety.  

Of course, the mere mention of a concept or idea like justice entices Socrates to start one of his typical examinations.  Socrates, Cephalus, and Polemarchus consider the definition of justice (331c - 336a) and advance to the point of saying that to be just is to benefit friends and harm enemies.  Suddenly, Thrasymachus breaks into the conversation, maintaining that “the just is ‘nothing else’ than the advantage of the stronger” (336b - 338c).  

Whereas Cephalus had started with the presupposition that being just is an attribute of an individual human person, Thrasymachus stated an abstract version of the just that could be applied equally well to governments, their ultimate rulers, and by extension, to any individual human person.  In fact, Socrates quickly pivots from individuals to governments and their leaders (338c - 356b).  Socrates deduces that justice is virtue and wisdom, while injustice is vice and ignorance (350d); that disunity (inner faction and lack of self-agreement) destroys individuals, while political faction destroys cities (351e - 352a); and that injustice can never be more profitable than justice (354a).  

It is during this dialog with Thrasymachus that Socrates enunciates the Greek presuppositions that the soul (psyche, or principle of life) has its own unique work (353d); that a good or bad soul manages “things” (living generally) either well or badly (353e); and that he who lives well is either happy (be it on a dichotomous or on a continuous scale) or even blessed (as an asymptotic limit to the continuous variable of happiness - see 354a).  

“Happiness” is a value term, synonymous with well-being or flourishing.  A second construal is as a word that purports to be a purely descriptive psychological term, grouped together with terms like ecstatic, tranquil, or depressed; and serving as a metric for relentlessly utilitarian government programs.  The purely psychological construal is certainly not what Plato had in mind, because Platonic happiness requires ethical action in order to live consistently with the objective essence of rational human persons.

Later in the Republic, Book IV, we will be told that the soul can be considered as having three faculties: See 436a for the distinction between learning [facts or reasons], desiring [and willing] pleasures, and feeling anger.  This “psychology section” in Book IV runs from 436a to at least 440d.  The three-fold faculties of the human soul are referred to the intellect, the will (or desire), and the emotions.  It is taken to be self-evidently true that the intellect - - dealing as it does with rational processes - - is the highest faculty of that rational animal known as the individual human person; and that, for the favored few, the rational process known as the contemplation of the Forms of truth, beauty, and goodness is the highest activity, approaching the limit of blessedness. 

Returning to the end of Book I, Thrasymachus “abandons the field,” and Socrates summarizes the investigation so far as follows (Book I: 354b): We interlocutors have failed to determine “what justice is” (regarding its essential nature) before trying to ascertain “something about it” (regarding its description as virtue or vice).  Asking whether justice is virtue and knowledge, or whether injustice is ignorance and vice, is premature as long as no one knows “what justice is.”  Consequently, 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.”

Glaucon and Adimantus now ask Socrates (Book II: 357b) if he had really thought that he had convinced them of the superiority of justice during his previous argument against Thrasymachus.  In other words, “Is it always better to be just than unjust?”  Glaucon challenges Socrates to give a better argument for his [Socrates’] position (357b - 358d).  Socrates accepts the challenge (358d).  Glaucon then recapitulates and embellishes Thrasymachus’ argument (358e - 362c).  Next, Adimantus continues the development of Thrasymachus’ objections to the thesis of the superiority of justice over injustice (362e - 367e).  

At that point (368c - d), Socrates remarks that their examination of the nature and origin of justice requires keen vision.  This keenness is like that required for seeing, from a distance, small letters (of the alphabet) drawn on a wall or surface.  Reading larger drawn letters on a larger, closer surface would be helpful in discerning letters, words, sentences, and meaning.  It is accepted by Adimantus that there is an analogy between discerning such drawn letters by sight and discerning justice by intellectual vision and rational argument. 

In 368e - 369a, we are told that because there is more justice in the larger object [city or city-state], therefore the city-state is more amenable to the analysis of justice than is the individual person.  We want to continue “looking for the likeness of the greater in the form of the less.”  (The idea of “more justice in the larger object” is also mentioned in Book IV: 434d - e.)  Moreover, if we can theoretically construct the origin of a city-state, then we should be able to pinpoint the origin of justice and injustice within the city-state.  In other words, Socrates believes that an account of the nature and origin of a good city - - and of its justice and virtue - - will help identify justice and virtue in an individual human person.  

Next week we will continue to follow Plato’s construction of the ideal city-state and his illumination of the idea of virtue in the ancient world.