The Republic
is in a league which protects the individual. Suppose however that one
of these owners and his household is carried off by a god into a
wilderness, where there are no freemen to help him—will he not be in an
agony of terror?—will he not be compelled to flatter his slaves and to
promise them many things sore against his will? And suppose the same
god who carried him off were to surround him with neighbours who
declare that no man ought to have slaves, and that the owners of them
should be punished with death. ‘Still worse and worse! He will be in
the midst of his enemies.’ And is not our tyrant such a captive soul,
who is tormented by a swarm of passions which he cannot indulge; living
indoors always like a woman, and jealous of those who can go out and
see the world?
Having so many evils, will not the most miserable of men be still more
miserable in a public station? Master of others when he is not master
of himself; like a sick man who is compelled to be an athlete; the
meanest of slaves and the most abject of flatterers; wanting all
things, and never able to satisfy his desires; always in fear and
distraction, like the State of which he is the representative. His
jealous, hateful, faithless temper grows worse with command; he is more
and more faithless, envious, unrighteous,—the most wretched of men, a
misery to himself and to others. And so let us have a final trial and
proclamation; need we hire a herald, or shall I proclaim the result?
‘Made the proclamation yourself.’ The son of Ariston (the best) is of
opinion that the best and justest of men is also the happiest, and that
this is he who is the most royal master of himself; and that the unjust
man is he who is the greatest tyrant of himself and of his State. And I
add further—‘seen or unseen by gods or men.’
This is our first proof. The second is derived from the three kinds of
pleasure, which answer to the three elements of the soul—reason,
passion, desire; under which last is comprehended avarice as well as
sensual appetite, while passion includes ambition, party-feeling, love
of reputation. Reason, again, is solely directed to the attainment of
truth, and careless of money and reputation. In accordance with the
difference of men’s natures, one of these three principles is in the
ascendant, and they have their several pleasures corresponding to them.
Interrogate now the three natures, and each one will be found praising
his own pleasures and depreciating those of others. The money-maker
will contrast the vanity of knowledge with the solid advantages of
wealth. The ambitious man will despise knowledge which brings no
honour; whereas the philosopher will regard only the fruition of truth,
and will call other pleasures necessary rather than good. Now, how
shall we decide between them? Is there any better criterion than
experience and knowledge? And which of the three has the truest
knowledge and the widest experience? The experience of youth makes the
philosopher acquainted with the two kinds of desire, but the avaricious
and the ambitious man never taste the pleasures of truth and wisdom.
Honour he has equally with them; they are ‘judged of him,’ but he is
‘not judged of them,’ for they never attain to the knowledge of true
being. And his instrument is reason, whereas their standard is only
wealth and honour; and if by reason we are to judge, his good will be
the truest. And so we arrive at the result that the pleasure of the
rational part of the soul, and a life passed in such pleasure is the
pleasantest. He who has a right to judge judges thus. Next comes the
life of ambition, and, in the third place, that of money-making.
Twice has the just man overthrown the unjust—once more, as in an
Olympian contest, first offering up a prayer to the saviour Zeus, let
him try a fall. A wise man whispers to me that the pleasures of the
wise are true and pure; all others are a shadow only. Let us examine
this: Is not pleasure opposed to pain, and is there not a mean state
which is neither? When a man is sick, nothing is more pleasant to him
than health. But this he never found out while he was well. In pain he
desires only to cease from pain; on the other hand, when he is in an
ecstasy of pleasure, rest is painful to him. Thus rest or cessation is
both pleasure and pain. But can that which is neither become both?
Again, pleasure and pain are motions, and the absence of them is rest;
but if so, how can the absence of either of them be the other? Thus we
are led to infer that the contradiction is an appearance only, and
witchery of the senses. And these are not the only pleasures, for there
are others which have no preceding pains. Pure pleasure then is not the
absence of pain, nor pure pain the absence of pleasure; although most
of the pleasures which reach the mind through the body are reliefs of
pain, and have not only their reactions when they depart, but their
anticipations before they come. They can be best described in a simile.
There is in nature an upper, lower, and middle region, and he who
passes from the lower to the middle imagines that he is going up and is
already in the upper world; and if he were taken back again would
think, and truly think, that he was descending. All this arises out of
his ignorance of the true upper, middle, and lower regions. And a like
confusion happens with pleasure and pain, and with many other things.
The man who compares grey with black, calls grey white; and the man who
compares absence of pain with pain, calls the absence of pain pleasure.
Again, hunger and thirst are inanitions of the body, ignorance and
folly of the soul; and food is the satisfaction of the one, knowledge
of the other. Now which is the purer satisfaction—that of eating and
drinking, or that of knowledge? Consider the matter thus: The
satisfaction of that which has more existence is truer than of that
which has less. The invariable and immortal has a more real existence
than the variable and mortal, and has a corresponding measure of
knowledge and truth. The soul, again, has more existence and truth and
knowledge than the body, and is therefore more really satisfied and has
a more natural pleasure. Those who feast only on earthly food, are
always going at random up to the middle and down again; but they never
pass into the true upper world, or have a taste of true pleasure. They
are like fatted beasts, full of gluttony and sensuality, and ready to
kill one another by reason of their insatiable lust; for they are not
filled with true being, and their vessel is leaky (Gorgias). Their
pleasures are mere shadows of pleasure, mixed with pain, coloured and
intensified by contrast, and therefore intensely desired; and men go
fighting about them, as Stesichorus says that the Greeks fought about
the shadow of Helen at Troy, because they know not the truth.
The same may be said of the passionate element:—the desires of the
ambitious soul, as well as of the covetous, have an inferior
satisfaction. Only when under the guidance of reason do either of the
other principles do their own business or attain the pleasure which is
natural to them. When not attaining, they compel the other parts of the
soul to pursue a shadow of pleasure which is not theirs. And the more
distant they are from philosophy and reason, the more distant they will
be from law and order, and the more illusive will be their pleasures.
The desires of love and tyranny are the farthest from law, and those of
the king are nearest to it. There is one genuine pleasure, and two
spurious ones: the tyrant goes beyond even the latter; he has run away
altogether from law and reason. Nor can the measure of his inferiority
be told, except in a figure. The tyrant is the third removed from the
oligarch, and has therefore, not a shadow of his pleasure, but the
shadow of a shadow only. The oligarch, again, is thrice removed from
the king, and thus we get the formula 3 x 3, which is the number of a
surface, representing the shadow which is the tyrant’s pleasure, and if
you like to cube this ‘number of the beast,’ you will find that the
measure of the difference amounts to 729; the king is 729 times more
happy than the tyrant. And this extraordinary number is NEARLY equal to
the number of days and nights in a year (365 x 2 = 730); and is
therefore concerned with human life. This is the interval between a
good and bad man in happiness only: what must be the difference between
them in comeliness of life and virtue!
Perhaps you may remember some one saying at the beginning of our
discussion that the unjust man was profited if he had the reputation of
justice. Now that we know the nature of justice and injustice, let us
make an image of the soul, which will personify his words. First of
all, fashion a multitudinous beast, having a ring of heads of all
manner of animals, tame and wild, and able to produce and change them
at pleasure. Suppose now another form of a lion, and another of a man;
the second smaller than the first, the third than the second; join them
together and cover them with a human skin, in which they are completely
concealed. When this has been done, let us tell the supporter of
injustice that he is feeding up the beasts and starving the man. The
maintainer of justice, on the other hand, is trying to strengthen the
man; he is nourishing the gentle principle within him, and making an
alliance with the lion heart, in order that he may be able to keep down
the many-headed hydra, and bring all into unity with each other and
with themselves. Thus in every point of view, whether in relation to
pleasure, honour, or advantage, the just man is right, and the unjust
wrong.
But now, let us reason with the unjust, who is not intentionally in
error. Is not the noble that which subjects the beast to the man, or
rather to the God in man; the ignoble, that which subjects the man to
the beast? And if so, who would receive gold on condition that he was
to degrade the noblest part of himself under the worst?—who would sell
his son or daughter into the hands of brutal and evil men, for any
amount of money? And will he sell his own fairer and diviner part
without any compunction to the most godless and foul? Would he not be
worse than Eriphyle, who sold her husband’s life for a necklace? And
intemperance is the letting loose of the multiform monster, and pride
and sullenness are the growth and increase of the lion and serpent
element, while luxury and effeminacy are caused by a too great
relaxation of spirit. Flattery and meanness again arise when the
spirited element is subjected to avarice, and the lion is habituated to
become a monkey. The real disgrace of handicraft arts is, that those
who are engaged in them have to flatter, instead of mastering their
desires; therefore we say that they should be placed under the control
of the better principle in another because they have none in
themselves; not, as Thrasymachus imagined, to the injury of the
subjects, but for their good. And our intention in educating the young,
is to give them self-control; the law desires to nurse up in them a
higher principle, and when they have acquired this, they may go their
ways.
‘What, then, shall a man profit, if he gain the whole world’ and become
more and more wicked? Or what shall he profit by escaping discovery, if
the concealment of evil prevents the cure? If he had been punished, the
brute within him would have been silenced, and the gentler element
liberated; and he would have united temperance, justice, and wisdom in
his soul—a union better far than any combination of bodily gifts. The
man of understanding will honour knowledge above all; in the next place
he will keep under his body, not only for the sake of health and
strength, but in order to attain the most perfect harmony of body and