Republic

How about this: Do you say that there is for everything its special good and evil, as for example for the eyes ophthalmia, for the entire body disease, for grain mildew, rotting for wood, rust for bronze and iron, and, as I say, for practically everything its congenital evil and disease[*](Ruskin, Time and Tide 52 (Brantwood ed. p. 68): Every faculty of man’s soul, and every instinct of it by which he is meant to live, is exposed to its own special form of corruption,; Boethius, Cons. iii. 11 (L.C.L. trans. p. 283), things are destroyed by what is hostile; Aristot. Top. 124 a 28 εἰ γὰρ τὸ φθαρτικὸν διαλυτικόν.)?I do, he said. Then when one of these evils comes to anything does it not make the thing to which it attaches itself bad, and finally disintegrate and destroy it? Of course. Then the congenital evil of each thing and its own vice destroys it, or if that is not going to destroy it, nothing else remains that could; for obviously[*](γεvi termini. Cf. 379 A, Phaedo 106 D.) the good will never destroy anything, nor yet again will that which is neutral and neither good nor evil[*](See What Plato Said, p. 490, on Lysis 216 D.). How could it? he said. If, then, we discover[*](Cf. Vol. I. p. 529, note a, on 478 D.) anything that has an evil which vitiates it, yet is not able to dissolve and destroy it, shall we not thereupon know that of a thing so constituted there can be no destruction? That seems likely, he said. Well, then, said I, has not the soul something that makes it evil? Indeed it has, he said, all the things that we were just now enumerating, injustice and licentiousness and cowardice and ignorance. Does any one of these things dissolve and destroy it? And reflect, lest we be misled by supposing that when an unjust and foolish man is taken in his injustice he is then destroyed by the injustice, which is the vice of soul. But conceive it thus: Just as the vice of body which is disease wastes and destroys it so that it no longer is a body at all,[*](Cf. Aristot. Pol. 1309 b 28 μηδὲ ῥῖνα ποιήσει φαίνεσθαι.) in like manner in all the examples of which we spoke it is the specific evil which, by attaching itself to the thing and dwelling in it with power to corrupt, reduces it to nonentity. Is not that so? Yes. Come, then, and consider the soul in the same way.[*](The argument that follows is strictly speaking a fallacy in that it confounds the soul with the physical principle of life. Cf. on 35 C and on 352 E, Gorg. 477 B-C, and ibid, Introd. p. lxvii. But Dean Inge, Platonism and Human Immortality (Aristot. Soc., 1919, p. 288) says: Plato’s argument, in the tenth book of the Republic, for the immortality of the soul, has found a place in scholastic theology, but is supposed to have been discredited by Kant. I venture to think that his argument, that the soul can only be destroyed by an enemy (so to speak) in pari materia, is sound. Physical evils, including death, cannot touch the soul. And wickedness does not, in our experience, dissolve the soul, nor is wickedness specially apparent when the soul (if it perishes at death) would be approaching dissolution. Cf. 610 C. Someone might object that wickedness does destroy the soul, conceived as a spiritual principle.) Do injustice and other wickedness dwelling in it, by their indwelling and attachment to it, corrupt and wither it till they bring it to death and separate it from the body? They certainly do not do that, he said. But surely, said I, it is unreasonable to suppose that the vice of something else destroys a thing while its own does not. Yes, unreasonable. For observe, Glaucon, said I, that we do not think it proper to say of the body either that it is destroyed by the badness of foods themselves, whether it be staleness or rottenness or whatever it is;[*](Plato generally disregards minor distinctions when they do not affect his point.)

but when the badness of the foods themselves engenders in the body the defect of body, then we shall say that it is destroyed owing to these foods, but by[*](Cf. 610 D.) its own vice, which is disease. But the body being one thing and the foods something else, we shall never expect the body to be destroyed by their badness, that is by an alien evil that has not produced in it the evil that belongs to it by nature.You are entirely right, he replied. On the same principle, said I, if the badness of the body does not produce in the soul the soul’s badness we shall never expect the soul to be destroyed by an alien evil apart from its own defect—one thing, that is, by the evil of another. That is reasonable, he said. Either, then, we must refute this and show that we are mistaken, or,[*](For the challenge to refute or accept the argument Cf. Soph. 259 A, 257 A, Gorg. 467 B-C, 482 B, 508 A-B, Phileb. 60 D-E.) so long as it remains unrefuted, we must never say that by fever or any other disease, or yet by the knife at the throat or the chopping to bits of the entire body, there is any more likelihood of the soul perishing because of these things, until it is proved that owing to these affections of the body the soul itself becomes more unjust and unholy. But when an evil of something else occurs in a different thing and the evil that belongs to the thing is not engendered in it, we must not suffer it to be said that the soul or anything else is in this way destroyed. But you may be sure, he said, that nobody will ever prove this, that the souls of the dying are made more unjust by death. But if anyone, said I, dares to come to grips with the argument[*](Or to take the bull by the horns. For ὁμόσε ἰέναι see What Plato Said, p. 457, on Euthyph. 3 C. Cf. ἐγγὺς ἰόντες Phaedo 95 B.) and say, in order to avoid being forced to admit the soul’s immortality, that a dying man does become more wicked and unjust,[*](Herbert Spencer nearly does this: Death by starvation from inability to catch prey shows a falling short of conduct from its ideal. It recalls the argument with which Socrates catches Callicles in Gorg. 498 E, that if all pleasures are alike those who feel pleasure are good and those who feel pain are bad.) we will postulate that, if what he says is true, injustice must be fatal to its possessor as if it were a disease, and that those who catch it die because it kills them by its own inherent nature, those who have most of it quickest, and those who have less more slowly, and not, as now in fact happens, that the unjust die owing to this but by the action of others who inflict the penalty. Nay, by Zeus, he said, injustice will not appear a very terrible thing after all if it is going to be[*](For the future indicative after εἰ, usually minatory or monitory in tone, cf. Aristoph. Birds 759, Phileb. 25 D.) fatal to its possessor, for that would be a release from all troubles.[*](Cf. Phaedo 107 C, 84 B, Blaydes on Aristoph. Acharn. 757.) But I rather think it will prove to be quite the contrary, something that kills others when it can, but renders its possessor very lively indeed,[*](μάλα is humorous, as in 506 D, Euthydem 298 D, Symp. 189 A.) and not only lively but wakeful,[*](Cf. Horace, Epist. i. 2. 32 ut iugulent hominem surgunt de nocte latrones.) so far, I ween, does it dwell[*](For the metaphor Cf. Proverbs viii. 12 σοφία κατεσκήνωσα βουλήν. Plato personifies injustice, as he does justice in 612 D,σκιαγραφία in 602 D, bravery in Laches 194 A,κολαστική in Soph. 229 A,κολακευτική Gorg. 464 C,σμικρότης Parmen. 150 A πονηρία Apol. 39 A-B, and many other abstract conceptions. See further Phileb. 63 A-B, 15 D, 24 A, Rep. 465 A-B, Laws 644 C, Cratyl. 438 D.) from deadliness. You say well, I replied; for when the natural vice and the evil proper to it cannot kill and destroy the soul, still less[*](σχολῇ: cf. 354 C, Phaedo 106 D.) will the evil appointed for the destruction of another thing destroy the soul or anything else, except that for which it is appointed.[*](Cf. 345 D.) Still less indeed, he said, in all probability.