I read the Republic

Political justice as foretold in The Republic 

In this work that I spent 8 hours on for some reason, I will present an argument using Plato's The Republic in order to explain how the practice of justice can and does arise in a soul. Plato tells us the story of a philosopher named Socrates, who told people to believe in a spirited, divine soul at a time when rhetorical and symbolic debate was the preferred method of communication. He was sentenced to death for "vile corruption of the youth," which showed us how carefully people had to communicate with each other in 399 B.C. By utilizing Socrates' argument about spendthrift drones and the shortcomings of political democracy, I will demonstrate that justice will naturally arise when the soul accepts harmony.

Socrates was in a heated debate with Plato. He was arguing for the existence of a shared, divine spirited-stuff 300 years before Christ. You know that saying, “it takes a village to raise a child?” Socrates told a similar story and it was called the Ring of Gyges. In this myth, two men: one moral, and the other immoral, put on rings that granted them invisibility. The immoral man learned that nobody could see him and started committing crime; doing silly things such as stealing and lying. Eventually it got so bad that he fell into a deep depression. He kept stealing and lying because that’s all he knew to do and ended up isolating himself out of loneliness and anger.

    But the first man, he was good and just. When he put on his ring, he tried to use his anonymity to save the world; but without being seen by others, he felt unsafe. Nobody told him right from wrong; they only told him to make his own world, and he was alone. Eventually he too succumbed to depression and started acting out of hopes of one day being seen again. 

    Therefore, the Ring of Gyges demonstrates that people are not born inherently good or bad; it takes a properly functioning city to raise a child to be happy and self-fulfilled. Socrates called this city The Just City and it was based on meritocracy, in which contributions were rewarded, and wrongdoers were punished in the eyes of the Law. 

    Socrates was cut short by Glaucon, who rudely dismissed his idea of the Just City by taking out the idea of a meritocracy and seeing whether people could function if the wrong men took office. This was the story of the City of Pigs. 

It was known as a body politic formed with a primary objective in mind: the wants and needs of people that grew with bodily instinct. It was a city run on unclear democracy, in which no one cared to vote or help others for fear of being mistook or wrongly understood. 

“There would be no need for governance in this City,” said Glaucon. He made fun of Socrates’ argument of equal rights by pushing it further, saying that if everyone was an equal, then a body could be considered self-sufficient without earning its own Hat. 

        Socrates and Plato immediately began listing all of the ways the City of Pigs fell short. People would do the tasks they wanted to do, but would barter and trade the services they needed to learn how to do on their own. These people learned that they could fulfill their body's every desire, and so they did. They represented the reluctance of mankind to do what he needed to do in order to keep his soul alive and healthy, in both waking state and in sleep. The City never learned to eat moderately, exercise both the body and the mind healthily, nor preform civic duty; which granted us purpose and kept us from idle spendthrift. With unchecked appetitive desire, the City of Pigs degenerated to one which was unhealthy and fevered. Citizens became obsessed with the accumulation of wealth and trade, and the City and body became unhealthy and prone to war.

Here, Plato interjected that Socrates’ roast of Glaucon’s city was getting too mean; calling it the “City of Pigs” was just plain rude—and the men agreed to start calling it the Fevered City, instead. Glaucon joined the table, genuinely curious to see how Socrates would continue building his city. Socrates told them that Glaucon’s Fevered City needed help—it had succumbed to danger because it was unable to moderate its’ own appetite. So, he tried to imagine what would happen if he gave the people military jurisdiction. He introduced the Fevered City to the warrior class.  

The warrior class naturally developed as defenders once war plundered the state, but Socrates placed emphasis on the importance of a proper education for these spirited men and women. He described how a rightful education would lead to a purification of the city, and similarly an Enlightenment of the Soul. He split the warrior class into two tiers. One was a guardian, who would announce and maintain the judgement of his education, and the other was the auxiliary warrior, who would know exactly how to enforce the rules within the City. 

 

(1) "The knowledge-loving" part of our soul was dedicated to doctors, astronomers, and mathematicians, whose souls strived to know the truth about the world they were in. 

The pleasure found when fulfilling this part of our desires is the purest and most just, Socrates decreed. Fighting the instinct of giving into our basic needs of laziness and hunger; the quest for wisdom was the best kind of desire. A true philosopher had to honor the intellectual part of his soul the most, in order to see the world in its truest nature, free of shadows and reflections thrown by water. Philosophers craved for this knowledge, which was found free of corruption, from variance or generation, and were by definition the lover of all things Just and True. 

(2) The part of the soul that loved love was the "spirited, and honor-loving" part. Herein lay our loyalty, bravery, and courage. 

    1. Our spirit is responsible for our boldness in the face of adversity and is reflected fearlessness and bravery  

    2. The spirit of our warriors would know what to fear and what to do when grounded in the belief of their Ruler's diction.

    3. Our spirit stands for contention and ambition, of understanding and belief, and appears as salvation when we cannot hold concrete evidence

Our spirit has to be ruled with careful moderation, because without harmony, this part of the soul could send an individual spiraling down the path of timocracy. 

 

(3) Then, came the basest and most dangerous part of the soul, "the appetite." 

Too much appetite without (1st) wisdom and moderation, nor (2nd) spiritual peace, created (3) a hungry unrest within the soul, driving a man to feed into his most basal desires with little regard to personal health or law. 

The appetite consisted of two divisions: necessary, as well as unnecessary desires. Socrates foretold in book 9 that with careful practice, a just individual could sacrifice all of his unnecessary desires and learn how to achieve. He would be tested in his dreams, to prove that mankind can eventually become completely free of any irrational, unintentional, or unwarranted desire. 

Giving in to the appetite strayed a man away from The Light: moral enlightenment warns us against tantalizing a person's anger or carnal desire, because pleasure-seeking habits are difficult to recognize and harder to break. 

Succumbing to the appetite slowly takes conscious control away from the individual and turns them into a Drone. 

Here, a man becomes most vulnerable to spendthrift, which drives him to satisfaction of unlawful desires. This results in a tyrannical individual with no control over his actions, becoming a slave to our most animal instincts. 

            Thus, basal temptations threaten to disrupt the natural realization of justice which resides within each individual. Every child is born with the potential of justice within them—it can be the fault of education, upbringing, peer pressure, or a corrupt spirit, which sparks the spiral for man’s regression further into the darkness and away from the Light from which we are all born.

Improper education can teach a man to value the wrong things: a child can be misdirected to value superficial wealth, and conditioned to suppress his true nature.

A disharmonious soul—one that is too prideful, too hungry, or too shy to speak up can all threaten the realization of justice.

 

Socrates warns us that an idle soul is easily corruptible, and with no real obligation makes for ideal prey of a drone. The drones, he defines, as jobless, lazy, and spendthrift people who latch onto the wealthy and squeeze them of their fruit. Drones will make the individual forget his familial obligations and commitments to the state, and seduce him to chase pleasures instead—when the seed of a soul is in an improper environment, he will be more sensitive to want a suitable climate and thus will succumb to the rule of the drones.

 

Socrates defines unnecessary pleasures as anything the body can survive without and which is not good for the soul; found in every man, even the most moderate in his sleep. 

 

 

Democracy arises in a body politic when drones want equal rights. 

·      Our leaders do not use law to curtail the spendthrift habits of their youth

·      This has been creating younger and younger generations of drones who are depressed and want to do nothing all day

·      Evil arises as the wealthy accumulate money

o   citizens lose use of their own property

o   others fall into crippling debt

o   others still surrender their citizenship

·      Virtue is forgotten as both the rich and poor become overcome with the lust of money-making, falling victim to basal pleasures and pain. 

 

To avoid further corruption by money-making oligarchs, citizens agree upon a social contract, which grants citizens the right to elect a governing body

·      Under a democracy, everyone is regarded as an equal

·      Magistrates are no longer determined by who holds the wealth but rather elected by lot

·      Men of all natures are allowed to wander freely and choose their own life 

·      This allows for the greatest variance in human nature; Socrates relates it to shopping at a bazaar: there are spirits of all colors behaving freely, doing as they please 

·      Those that are condemned or exiled can be witnessed amid the rest of their citizens, behaving at their free will—a sight that Socrates remarks as supremely delightful, being able to observe humanity at its sheerest and most raw

 

This form of governance allows for human nature to expose itself. The world is full of variety and disorder, and in a democracy human nature is laid out in its many stages of evolution and regression. Man’s character is exposed. This blended assortment of personal constitutions allows for the ideal selection of government: in the bazaar analogy, one need only observe the various constitutions of man to pick one that suits his template of the ideal state. Indeed, it seems as though democracy has a complete disregard when it comes to all of the principles necessary for building a state; she is far too lenient, far too chaotic. There is an equality distributed amid all men, equality between unequal.

 

Sometimes, drones cannot corrupt the young—herein lies the strength of the democratic principle, who reveal children with the self-discipline to reject carnal temptations and follow in their parents’ careful footsteps: these are said to have a spirit of reverence, and they are fair and rare among us. However, more often than not the youth fall victim to the drone’s honey, and their bodies and minds become slowly corrupt with luxury and idleness. 

 

Children start to confuse impudence with courage and anarchy with liberty.  

Any characteristics that were once virtues are swept clean of the child’s soul, replaced with a useless and unnecessary liberty that gives a false sense of entitlement and success. This is not to say that the child’s soul is totally corrupt: rather, floating through a state of transience; one day, he may be studious and disciplined, the next, wild and a drunkard, he may value exercise and diet but binge on luxurious foods, he may dedicate himself to philosophy but fall to idling and neglecting, swept by politics and the opinions of whatever comes to his head, the democratic soul has no sense of direction, no law or order to keep from chasing every pleasure and falling victim to every pain. 

It is said that those who grow up under rule of democracy live a distracted existence of joy and pain. Freedom is the glory of the state—and it becomes its ultimate demise. Subjects and rulers become one; there is no peace or satisfaction to be found in boundless freedom. 

Socrates warned us that too much of a good thing is never safe, and in this case, democracy shows us that too much liberation leads to the enslavement of a soul.

Justice is described as the use of laws for fair judgement and treatment among individuals. 

Justice arises in the democratic city through every man whose soul is in balance and has come to accept harmony. Rulers are those who maintain the laws and institutions of the state—who can see the truth of each thing, understand the nature of humanity and the nature of peace.