Republic

When I had said this I supposed that I was done with the subject, but it all turned out to be only a prelude. For Glaucon, who is always an intrepid enterprising spirit in everything, would not on this occasion acquiesce in Thrasymachus’s abandonment[*](So in Philebus 11 C, Philebus cries off or throws up the sponge in the argument.) of his case, but said, Socrates, is it your desire to seem to have persuaded us or really to persuade us that it is without exception better to be just than unjust? Really, I said, if the choice rested with me. Well, then, you are not doing what you wish. For tell me: do you agree that there is a kind of good[*](Aristotle borrows this classification from Plato (Topics 118 b 20-22), but liking to differ from his teacher, says in one place that the good which is desired solely for itself is the highest. The Stoics apply the classification to preferables (Diogenes Laertius vii. 107). Cf. Hooker, Eccles. Pol. i. 11. Elsewhere Plato distinguishes goods of the soul, of the body, and of possessions (Laws 697 B, 727-729) or as the first Alcibiades puts it (131) the self, the things of the self, and other things.) which we would choose to possess, not from desire for its after effects, but welcoming it for its own sake? As, for example, joy and such pleasures are harmless[*](Plato here speaks of harmless pleasures, from the point of view of common sense and prudential morality. Cf. Tim. 59 D ἀμεταμέλητον ἡδονήν, Milton’s Mirth that after no repenting draws. But the Republic (583 D) like the Gorgias (493 E-494 C) knows the more technical distinction of the Philebus (42 C ff., 53 C ff.) between pure pleasures and impure, which are conditioned by desire and pain.) and nothing results from them afterwards save to have and to hold the enjoyment. I recognise that kind, said I. And again a kind that we love both for its own sake and for its consequences,[*](Isocrates i. 47 has this distinction, as well as Aristotle.) such as understanding,[*](Some philosophers, as Aristippus (Diogenes Laertius x. 1. 138), said that intelligence is a good only for its consequences, but the opening sentences of Aritotle’s Metaphysics treat all forms of knowledge as goods in themselves.) sight, and health?[*](Plutarch (1040 C) says that Chrysippus censured Plato for recognizing health as a good, but elsewhere Plato explicitly says that even health is to be disregarded when the true interests of the soul require it.) For these presume we welcome for both reasons. Yes, I said. And can you discern a third form of good under which falls exercise and being healed when sick and the art of healing and the making of money generally? For of them we would say that they are laborious and painful yet beneficial, and for their own sake we would not accept them, but only for the rewards and other benefits that accrue from them. Why yes, I said, I must admit this third class also. But what of it? In which of these classes do you place justice? he said.

In my opinion, I said, it belongs in the fairest class, that which a man who is to be happy must love both for its own sake and for the results. Yet the multitude, he said, do not think so, but that it belongs to the toilsome class of things that must be practised for the sake of rewards and repute due to opinion but that in itself is to be shunned as an affliction. I am aware, said I, that that is the general opinion and Thrasymachus has for some time been disparaging it as such and praising injustice. But I, it seems, am somewhat slow to learn. Come now, he said, hear what I too have to say and see if you agree with me. For Thrasymachus seems to me to have given up to you too soon, as if he were a serpent[*](For Plato’s fondness for the idea of κηλεῖν cf. The Unity of Plato’s Thought, note 500.) that you had charmed, but I am not yet satisfied with the proof that has been offered about justice and injustice. For what I desire is to hear what each of them is and what potency and effect it has in and of itself dwelling in the soul,[*](Cf. 366 E.) but to dismiss their rewards and consequences. This, then, is what I propose to do, with your concurrence. I will renew the argument of Thrasymachus and will first state what men say is the nature and origin of justice; secondly, that all who practise it do so reluctantly, regarding it as something necessary[*](Cf. 347 C-D.) and not as a good; and thirdly, that they have plausible grounds for thus acting, since forsooth the life of the unjust man is far better than that of the just man—as they say; though I, Socrates, don’t believe it. Yet I am disconcerted when my ears are dinned by the arguments of Thrasymachus and innumerable others.[*](Cf. Philebus 66 E. Plato affirms that the immoralism of Thrasymachus and Callicles was widespread in Greece. Cf. Introduction x-xi, and Gorgias 511 B, Protagoras 333 C, Euthydemus 279 B, and my paper on the interpretation of the Timaeus, A.J.P. vol. ix. pp. 403-404.) But the case for justice, to prove that it is better than injustice, I have never yet heard stated by any as I desire to hear it. What I desire is to hear an encomium on justice in and by itself. And I think I am most likely to get that from you. For which reason I will lay myself out in praise of the life of injustice, and in so speaking will give you an example of the manner in which I desire to hear from you in turn the dispraise of injustice and the praise of justice. Consider whether my proposal pleases you. Nothing could please me more, said I; for on what subject would a man of sense rather delight to hold and hear discourse again and again? That is excellent, he said; and now listen to what I said would be the first topic—the nature and origin of justice.

By nature,[*](Glaucon employs the antithesis between nature and law and the theory of an original social contract to expound the doctrine of Thrasymachus and Callicles in the Gorgias. His statement is more systematic than theirs, but the principle is the same; for, though Callicles does not explicitly speak of a social contract, he implies that conventional justice is an agreement of the weak devised to hold the strong in awe. (Gorgias 492 C), and Glaucon here affirms that no relally strong man would enter into any such agreement. The social contract without the immoral application is also suggested in Protagoras 322 B. Cf. also Crito 50 C, f.) they say, to commit injustice is a good and to suffer it is an evil, but that the excess of evil in being wronged is greater than the excess of good in doing wrong. So that when men do wrong and are wronged by one another and taste of both, those who lack the power to avoid the one and take the other determine that it is for their profit to make a compact with one another neither to commit nor to suffer injustice; and that this is the beginning of legislation and covenants between men, and that they name the commandment of the law the lawful and the just, and that this is the genesis and essential nature of justice—a compromise between the best, which is to do wrong with impunity, and the worst, which is to be wronged and be impotent to get one’s revenge. Justice, they tell us, being mid-way between the two, is accepted and approved, not as a real good, but as a thing honored in the lack of vigor to do injustice, since anyone who had the power to do it and was in reality a man would never make a compact with anybody either to wrong nor to be wronged; for he would be mad. The nature, then, of justice is this and such as this, Socrates, and such are the conditions in which it originates, according to the theory. But as for the second point, that those who practise it do so unwillingly and from want of power to commit injustice—we shall be most likely to apprehend that if we entertain some such supposition as this in thought: if we grant to each, the just and the unjust, licence and power to do whatever he pleases, and then accompany them in imagination and see whither his desire will conduct each. We should then catch the just man in the very act of resorting to the same conduct as the unjust man because of the self-advantage which every creature by its nature pursues as a good, while by the convention of law[*](The antithesis of φύσις and νόμος, nature and law, custom or convention, is a commonplace of both Greek rhetoric and Greek ethics. Cf. the Chicago dissertation of John Walter Beardslee, The Use of φύσις in Fifth Century Greek Literature, ch. x. p. 68. Cf. Herodotus iii. 38, Pindar, quoted by Plato, Gorgias 484 B, Laws 690 B, 715 A; Euripides or Critias, Frag. of Sisyphus, Aristophanes Birds 755 ff., Plato Protagoras 337 D, Gorgias 483 E, Laws 889 C and 890 D. It was misused by ancient as it is by modern radicals. Cf. my interpretation of the Timaeus, A.J.P. vol. ix. p. 405. The ingenuity of modern philologians has tried to classify the Greek sophists as distinctly partisans of νόμος or φύσις. It cannot be done. Cf. my unsigned review of Alfred Benn in the New York Nation, July 20, 1899, p. 57.) it is forcibly diverted to paying honor to equality.[*](Cf. Gorgias 508 A.) The licence that I mean would be most nearly such as would result from supposing them to have the power which men say once came to the ancestor of Gyges the Lydian.[*](So manuscripts and Proclus. There are many emendations which the curious will find in Adam’s first appendix to the book. Herodotus i. 8-13 tells a similar but not identical story of Gyges himself, in which the magic ring and many other points of Plato’s tale are lacking. On the whole legend cf. the study of Kirby Flower Smith, A.J.P. vol. xxiii. pp. 261-282, 361-387, and Frazer’s Paus. iii. p. 417.) They relate that he was a shepherd in the service of the ruler at that time of Lydia, and that after a great deluge of rain and an earthquake the ground opened and a chasm appeared in the place where he was pasturing; and they say that he saw and wondered and went down into the chasm; and the story goes that he beheld other marvels there and a hollow bronze horse with little doors, and that he peeped in and saw a corpse within, as it seemed, of more than mortal stature, and that there was nothing else but a gold ring on its hand, which he took off and went forth. And when the shepherds held their customary assembly to make their monthly report to the king about the flocks, he also attended wearing the ring.

So as he sat there it chanced that he turned the collet of the ring towards himself, towards the inner part of his hand, and when this took place they say that he became invisible[*](Mr. H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man rests on a similar fancy. Cf. also the lawless fancies of Aristophanes Birds 785 ff.) to those who sat by him and they spoke of him as absent and that he was amazed, and again fumbling with the ring turned the collet outwards and so became visible. On noting this he experimented with the ring to see if it possessed this virtue, and he found the result to be that when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, and when outwards visible; and becoming aware of this, he immediately managed things so that he became one of the messengers who went up to the king, and on coming there he seduced the king’s wife and with her aid set upon the king and slew him and possessed his kingdom. If now there should be two such rings, and the just man should put on one and the unjust the other, no one could be found, it would seem, of such adamantine[*](The word is used of the firmness of moral faith in Gorgias 509 A and Republic 618 E.) temper as to persevere in justice and endure to refrain his hands from the possessions of others and not touch them, though he might with impunity take what he wished even from the marketplace, and enter into houses and lie with whom he pleased, and slay and loose from bonds whomsoever he would, and in all other things conduct himself among mankind as the equal of a god.[*](ἰσόθεος. The word is a leit-motif anticipating Plato’s rebuke of the tragedians for their praises of the tyraant. Cf. 568 A-B. It does not, as Adam suggests, foreshadow Plato’s attack on the popular theology.) And in so acting he would do no differently from the other man, but both would pursue the same course. And yet this is a great proof, one might argue, that no one is just of his own will but only from constraint, in the belief that justice is not his personal good, inasmuch as every man, when he supposes himself to have the power to do wrong, does wrong. For that there is far more profit for him personally in injustice than in justice is what every man believes, and believes truly, as the proponent of this theory will maintain. For if anyone who had got such a licence within his grasp should refuse to do any wrong or lay his hands on others’ possessions, he would be regarded as most pitiable[*](Cf. 344 A, Gorgias 492 B.) and a great fool by all who took note of it,[*](αἰσθανομένοις suggests men of discernment who are not taken in by phrases, the knowing ones. Cf. Protagoras 317 A, and Aristophanes Clouds 1241 τοῖς εἰδόσιν.) though they would praise him[*](Cf. Gorgias 483 B, 492 A, Protagoras 327 B, Aristotle Rhet. ii. 23.) before one another’s faces, deceiving one another because of their fear of suffering injustice. So much for this point. But to come now to the decision[*](Cf. 580 B-C, Philebus 27 C.) between our two kinds of life, if we separate the most completely just and the most completely unjust man, we shall be able to decide rightly, but if not, not. How, then, is this separation to be made? Thus: we must subtract nothing of his injustice from the unjust man or of his justice from the just, but assume the perfection of each in his own mode of conduct.

In the first place, the unjust man must act as clever craftsmen do: a first-rate pilot or physician, for example, feels the difference between impossibilities[*](Cf. Quint. iv. 5. 17 recte enim Graeci praecipiunt non tentanda quae effici omnino non possint.) and possibilities in his art and attempts the one and lets the others go; and then, too, if he does happen to trip, he is equal to correcting his error. Similarly, the unjust man who attempts injustice rightly must be supposed to escape detection if he is to be altogether unjust, and we must regard the man who is caught as a bungler.[*](Cf. Emerson, Eloquence: Yet any swindlers we have known are novices and bunglers. . . . A greater power of face would accomplish anything and with the rest of the takings take away the bad name.) For the height of injustice[*](Cf, Cicero De offic. i. 13.) is to seem just without being so. To the perfectly unjust man, then, we must assign perfect injustice and withhold nothing of it, but we must allow him, while committing the greatest wrongs, to have secured for himself the greatest reputation for justice; and if he does happen to trip,[*](Cf. Thucydides vii. 24 on the miscalculation of the shrewd Chians.) we must concede to him the power to correct his mistakes by his ability to speak persuasively if any of his misdeeds come to light, and when force is needed, to employ force by reason of his manly spirit and vigor and his provision of friends and money; and when we have set up an unjust man of this character, our theory must set the just man at his side—a simple and noble man, who, in the phrase of Aeschylus, does not wish to seem but be good. Then we must deprive him of the seeming.[*](As Aristotle sententiously says,ὅρος δὲ τοῦ πρὸς δόξαν ὃ λανθάνειν μέλλων οὐκ ἂν ἕλοιτο (Rhet. 1365 b 1, Topics iii. 3. 14).) For if he is going to be thought just he will have honors and gifts because of that esteem. We cannot be sure in that case whether he is just for justice’s sake or for the sake of the gifts and the honors. So we must strip him bare of everything but justice and make his state the opposite of his imagined counterpart.[*](For the thought cf. Euripides Helen 270-271.) Though doing no wrong he must have the repute of the greatest injustice, so that he may be put to the test as regards justice through not softening because of ill repute and the consequences thereof. But let him hold on his course unchangeable even unto death, seeming all his life to be unjust though being just, that so, both men attaining to the limit, the one of injustice, the other of justice, we may pass judgement which of the two is the happier.Bless me, my dear Glaucon, said I, how strenuously you polish off each of your two men for the competition for the prize as if it were a statue.[*](Cf. 540 C.) To the best of my ability, he replied, and if such is the nature of the two, it becomes an easy matter, I fancy, to unfold the tale of the sort of life that awaits each. We must tell it, then; and even if my language is somewhat rude and brutal,[*](Cf. 613 E, Gorgias 486 C, 509 A, Apology 32 D. The Greeks were sensitive to rude or boastful speech.) you must not suppose, Socrates, that it is I who speak thus, but those who commend injustice above justice.

What they will say is this: that such being his disposition the just man will have to endure the lash, the rack, chains, the branding-iron in his eyes, and finally, after every extremity of suffering, he will be crucified,[*](Or strictly impaled. Cf. Cicero De Rep. iii. 27. Writers on Plato and Christianity have often compared the fate of Plato’s just man with the crucifixion.) and so will learn his lesson that not to be but to seem just is what we ought to desire. And the saying of Aeschylus[*](Aesch. Seven 592-594) was, it seems, far more correctly applicable to the unjust man. For it is literally true, they will say, that the unjust man, as pursuing what clings closely to reality, to truth, and not regulating his life by opinion, desires not to seem but to be unjust,

1. Exploiting the deep furrows of his wit

1. From which there grows the fruit of counsels shrewd,

Fathers, when they address exhortations to their sons, and all those who have others in their charge,[*](Who, in Quaker language, have a concern for, who have charge of souls. Cf. the admonitions of the father of Horace, Satire i. 4. 105 ff., Protagoras 325 D, Xenophon Cyr. i. 5. 9, Isocrates iii. 2, Terence Adelphi 414 f., Schmidt, Ethik der Griechen, i. p. 187, and the letters of Lord Chesterfield, passim, as well as Plato himself, Laws 662 E.) urge the necessity of being just, not by praising justice itself, but the good repute with mankind that accrues from it, the object that they hold before us being that by seeming to be just the man may get from the reputation office and alliances and all the good things that Glaucon just now enumerated as coming to the unjust man from his good name. But those people draw out still further this topic of reputation. For, throwing in good standing with the gods, they have no lack of blessings to describe, which they affirm the gods give to pious men, even as the worthy Hesiod and Homer declare, the one that the gods make the oaks bear for the just:

Acorns on topmost branches and swarms of bees on their mid-trunks,

Flocks of the fleece-bearing sheep are laden and weighted with soft wool,

1. Even as when a good king, who rules in the fear of the high gods,
2. Upholds justice and right, and the black earth yields him her foison,

1. Barley and wheat, and his trees are laden and weighted with fair fruits,
2. Increase comes to his flocks and the ocean is teeming with fishes.

Consider further, Socrates, another kind of language about justice and injustice employed by both laymen and poets. All with one accord reiterate that soberness and righteousness are fair and honorable, to be sure, but unpleasant and laborious, while licentiousness and injustice are pleasant and easy to win and are only in opinion and by convention disgraceful. They say that injustice pays better than justice, for the most part, and they do not scruple to felicitate bad men who are rich or have other kinds of power to do them honor in public and private, and to dishonor and disregard those who are in any way weak or poor, even while admitting that they are better men than the others. But the strangest of all these speeches are the things they say about the gods[*](The gnomic poets complain that bad men prosper for a time, but they have faith in the late punishment of the wicked and the final triumph of justice.) and virtue, how so it is that the gods themselves assign to many good men misfortunes and an evil life but to their opposites a contrary lot; and begging priests[*](There is a striking analogy between Plato’s language here and the description by Protestant historians of the sale of indulgences by Tetzel in Germany. Rich men’s doors is proverbial. Cf. 489 B.) and soothsayers go to rich men’s doors and make them believe that they by means of sacrifices and incantations have accumulated a treasure of power from the gods[*](Cf. Mill, Utility of Religion, Three Essays on Religion, p. 90: All positive religions aid this self-delusion. Bad religions teach that divine vengeance may be bought off by offerings or personal abasement. Plato, Laws 885 D, anticipates Mill. With the whole passage compare the scenes at the founding of Cloudcuckootown, Aristophanes Birds 960-990, and more seriously the medieval doctrine of the treasure of the church and the Hindu tapas.) that can expiate and cure with pleasurable festivals any misdeed of a man or his ancestors, and that if a man wishes to harm an enemy, at slight cost he will be enabled to injure just and unjust alike, since they are masters of spells and enchantments[*](In Laws 933 D both are used of the victim with ἐπῳδαῖς, which primarily applies to the god. Cf. Lucan, Phars. vi. 492 and 527.) that constrain the gods to serve their end. And for all these sayings they cite the poets as witnesses, with regard to the ease and plentifulness of vice, quoting:

1. Evil-doing in plenty a man shall find for the seeking;

1. Smooth is the way and it lies near at hand and is easy to enter;
2. But on the pathway of virtue the gods put sweat from the first step,

1. The gods themselves are moved by prayers,
2. And men by sacrifice and soothing vows,

1. And incense and libation turn their wills
2. Praying, whenever they have sinned and made transgression.