‘Republic (Book IV)’: On the Just City and the Just Soul
A review of ‘Republic (Book IV)’, by Plato; Penguin Classics, 2007.
Bill Belichick, former head coach of the all-conquering New England Patriots, was fond of telling his team to ‘do your job’. His aim was to remind each player that his task was to fulfil the responsibilities of his role, nothing more or less. On the field as in life, we too often stray from our path, often with good intentions. If instead we focused on what was ours to do, trusting others to do the same, we would achieve far more as a group, just as an orchestra plays best when each player plays her own part.
This is an old idea, one that emerges from the pages of Plato and Socrates’ exchange with Glaucon. In Book IV, the topic at hand is the perfect city and soul. Plato’s Socrates speaks of justice, wisdom, courage and self-control; sets out the traits of the rulers, guardians and workers of the ideal state; and shows how each group, like each part of the soul, has its own duties wirh which it must concern itself exclusively.
In Book IV, the topic at hand is the perfect city and soul.
The just city, or kallipolis, depends on harmony. Harmony arises when each class does that for which it is best suited. Rulers rule, guardians guard, workers work. In the same way, the just person must let reason (her powers of logic) rule, with spirit (her sense of honour and feeling) and desire (her drive to satisfy her wants and needs) in lesser roles. ‘Justice is doing one’s own work and not meddling with what isn’t one’s own,’ says Socrates, conveying the key idea that each part of the city and soul should stick to its task – should, per Bellichick, ‘do its job’.
The analogy of city and soul can seem awkward. It either anthromorphises the state or, on the other hand, mechanises the human being. What Socrates tries to get across is the need for balance. If, in a state, those best-disposed to perform a given task, such as produce and provide food or protect the city from outside and inside threats, perform that task diligently, then there will be equilibrium. The workers may wish to rule; but they are more suited to work. Likewise, the human person may want to satsify her every whim and put pleasure over and above her other faculties and drives, but she will live with more peace if she lets reason be her guide and spirit move her to action while restraining her desire. A person is wise if he is ruled by the part of the soul that knows ‘what is beneficial for each part and for the whole’, brave if his spirited part ‘preserves in the midst of pleasures and pains’ the choices made by the rational part, and temperate if the three parts agree that the rational part lead.
Harmony arises when each class does that for which it is best suited.
Progress through Book IV can feel slow. But this is part of the point. The Republic is an exercise in logic, and the back-and-forth between the interlocuters mirrors the method by which we can in our own minds reach conclusions from first principles. At each step, we are invited to consider counterpoints and qualifications, and so to develop our powers of reasoning. Indeed, we could argue that the Republic is not, or not exclusively, about the perfect city or state or the nature of justice, but is as much an extended exercise in training what Socrates sees as our highest faculty. Like the novice painters who would copy the work of better artists through an apprenticeship, we are invited to trace the contours of Socrates’ thought, spurred in part by Glaucon, and so become better thinkers.
But there is still something to say about such high-minded matters as the perfect state and the ordered soul. Oakeshott writes that British political liberty springs from a creative tension between our institutions. The ying-yang symbol represents the balance of opposites. Our word paradise comes from the Old Persian word pairidaeza, meaning ‘walled garden’, suggesting the right balance of culture and nature, of order and chaos. In the writings of countless thinkers, from Heraclitus to Iain McGilchrist, great attention is played to this ancient concern with the right relationship of different parts, to freedom and unfreedom, to harmony, to complementarity, and to the Gestalt effect brought about when discrete elements concerning themselves with what they are individually meant to do. We are asked to consider who we are, where our skills lie, and how we might contribute best to the life of our community.
