E-mail Archives : The city and the soul in Plato's Republic June 4-8, 1996

This page is part of the "e-mail archives" section of a site, Plato and his dialogues, dedicated to developing a new interpretation of Plato's dialogues. The "e-mail archives" section includes HTML edited versions of posts that I submitted on various e-mail discussion lists about Plato and ancient philosophy.

To: plato <plato@freelance.com>
Date : June 4, 1996, 08:08:03
Subject : Re: reading the dialogues

> The question I would like to raise, or perhaps just re-emphasize, is therefore this: what sense can be made of the city/soul analogy? Can it be said to make sense in its literal meaning? And if not, what does it mean, and what consequence does it have for the dialogue as a whole? Best Regards, Matthew C. Simpson.

The whole purpose of Plato with this analogy is to have us understand that there cannot be social justice (the city) if each one of us doesn't first bring internal justice (the soul) in himself. That's why any reading of the Republic that focuses either on the political side or on the psychological side is bound to failure. What it says is that man is private and political, that his soul, that is his self, is not a given unity, not even the battelfield between two antagonistic principles (good and evil, matter and mind, call them as you'll like) but a threefold construct whose unity he has to build through his life. This is why justice (that Platonic/Socratic justice both internal and social) is the big thing for man, in effect the form of man...

In his response to my question concerning the meaning of the city/soul analogy in the Republic, Mr. Suzanne said that its purpose is to show that there cannot be "social" justice without "internal" justice. And this is certainly not a claim with which I would disagree. It seems correct to say that one of the lessons of the Republic is that a properly ordered (that is, just) regime is possible only if the souls of its citizens are also properly ordered. But this does not really answer my question. The issue is, rather, this: the assumption that underlies the whole analogy is that the soul of the citizen is isomorphic to the regime within which he or she lives. This is a strong claim, and if Plato's point is simply what Mr. Suzanne suggests, it seems unnecessry for Plato to formulate the issue in such radical terms. It is one thing to say, as Mr. Suzanne does, that justice in the city and justice in the soul are closely linked, it is something different to say that the individual's soul has the same shape as the city in which he or she lives. The former seems sensible, the latter seems very strange; yet it is upon the latter that the intelligibility of the city/soul analogy depends. So, to restate the question, what does Socrates mean in Book II when he claims that the city and the soul have the same shape, just as a big letter and a small letter have the same shape? It seems insufficient to say that all this claim means is that justice in the city depends upon justice in the soul. Best regards, Matthew Simpson.

From : C.B. Willis <cbwillis@netcom.com>
To: plato <plato@freelance.com>
Date : June 4, 1996, 14:17:35
Subject : re: the city and the soul

Insufficient? Unnecessarily radical? My reading is that Plato means exactly that: justice in the city depends on justice in the soul - quite sufficient, and necessarily radical [to the root].

The individual soul, in collaboration with others, shapes a city, shapes the environment according to its own consciousness and wisdom. The city or state, as a product of the individuals who created it, reflects the consciousness and wisdom of its creators.

The converse of that, that the state of the soul is shaped by the state of the city, while appealing to behavioral psychologists, is untenable philosophically, even though fine teachers and educational methods are a tribute to a city. A soul of golden caliber with good spiritual recollection can and will bypass even a poor education offered by a city, bypass inferior environmental influences, to prevail.

To: plato <plato@freelance.com>
Date : June 5, 1996, 08:00:49
Subject : Re: the city and the soul

> ...So, to restate the question, what does Socrates mean in Book II when he claims that the city and the soul have the same shape, just as a big letter and a small letter have the same shape? It seems insufficient to say that all this claim means is that justice in the city depends upon justice in the soul. Best regards, Matthew Simpson.

For Plato, the city is the work of man, that is of man's soul. It may be ruled by the laws produced by his reason, or managed by conflicts of wills or else let drift according to the citizens' conficting desires. In his mind it should be ruled by laws (the Laws is the last step of the educational process of the dialogues) so that both the will and the desires of the citizens find reasonable satisfaction in it.

Because of that, the city is the image of how the souls of the citizens understand themselves and the world around them, what they will and desire and how they go about arbitrating between these sometime conflicting goals. The city is to the soul of men what the world is to the demiourgos of the Timæus, hence the Timæus as a prelude to the Laws (with a reminder before the muthos starts, that is, outside the time and space of Timæus' speech, or rather, simply outside time and space, of the Republic, the ideal of justice, that is the ultimate "form" of man, before the display within the speech of these other "forms" of man that are his god given soul, his "biological" structure, and the "form" of the matter he is made of, the triangles). Man should take exemple on the kosmos, the order of the world (Timæus) to bring order in his world, the city (Laws), provided his will can properly exercize his judgment (Critias=krisis, and the voluntary stop as a test, when god is about to take over to bring back order into man's world).

> The converse of that, that the state of the soul is shaped by the state of the city, while appealing to behavioral psychologists, is untenable philosophically, even though fine teachers and educational methods are a tribute to a city. A soul of golden caliber with good spiritual recollection can and will bypass even a poor education offered by a city, bypass inferior environmental influences, to prevail. C.B. Willis

I cannot agree with that, no more than Plato would. A man whose whole business in life was to educate people cannot think that the soul can alone overcome the evil of a bad city. And if you can lean it toward the good, you can certainly lean it toward evil, no matter how good it is in the first place. Plato says it toward the middle of the Republic, when talking about the philosopher in the city and the influence of a bad city on good natures, and he says it by starting his whole educational process with the example of Alcibiades. He says it again in the Republic by intermingling the description of the decay of city and man alike through various constitutions without saying which is the cause of which (in effect, he starts each step with the constitution of the city before describing the corresponding man).

From : Matthew Simpson <MaChesSimp@aol.com>,
To: plato <plato@freelance.com>
Date : June 5, 1996, 02:25:28
Subject : the city and the soul

The latest contribution by Mr. Willis [see above] constitutes what I take to be progress in the effort to understand the city/soul analogy in the Republic. But I must make a clarification with respect to his response to my last note. What I take to be "unnecessarily radical" is not the view that justice in the city depends upon justice in the soul. This view is certainly radical, but (as Mr. Willis says) it is necessarily so. It would, however, be unnecessarily radical for one to express this view about the relation between the city and the soul by means of the city/soul analogy in the Republic. In other words, and this is simply what I said before, it seems to me implausible to suggest that all Plato intends by the analogy is to express the view that justice in the city depends upon justice in the soul. Plato may in fact believe that justice in the city depends upon justice in the soul, but this belief does not by itself imply that the two are isomorphic. This latter claim (that the city and the soul are isomorphic) is a much stronger one, and I do not believe that our discussion so far has explained why Plato makes it.

It is at this point that Mr. Willis makes his contribution: he claims that Plato is here drawing our attention to the fact that citizens make their cities, and thus cities necessarily reflect the character of their citizens; thus in this sense the two are analogous. This seems to me a very good insight. Yet it faces an obvious difficulty: cities are not homogeneous with respect to the kinds of souls which comprise them. Indeed, as is needless to say, the city built up in speech is itself composed of three kinds of souls; yet the city itself is isomorphic only to the gold souls. Thus the city/soul analogy seems to be contradicted by the very city that is constructed on the basis of it. Moreover, if Mr. Willis is correct that souls are not shaped by the cities in which they are born, then it would be impossible for a city to be homogeneous in this respect, and thus untenable to say that cities simply take the shape of their citizens. In sum, it is not my intention to disagree with the basic claims of either Mr. Suzanne or Mr. Willis. It may be correct, as Mr. Suzanne says, that Plato believes justice in the city depends upon justice in the soul; and it may be correct, as Mr. Willis says, that Plato believes the different kinds of souls to be "born and not made." What I do disagree with, however, is the belief that either of these two positions, which we are attributing to Plato, is sufficient to explain the meaning of the city/soul analogy. The former does not explain it because it is possible for justice in the city to depend upon justice in the soul without the two being isomorphic; and the latter does not explain it because the fact that people make their cities (and not vice-versa) does not imply that the soul of every citizen has the same shape as the city in which he or she lives. Yet it is precisely this claim (that the soul of every citizen has the same shape as the city in which he or she lives) that is embodied in the city/soul analogy, and thereby underlies most of the Republic; and I do not think that we have yet made sense of it. With my best regards,

Matthew C. Simpson

Matthew C. Simpson writes:

> ...Yet it is precisely this claim (that the soul of every citizen has the same shape as the city in which he or she lives) that is embodied in the city/soul analogy, and thereby underlies most of the Republic; and I do not think that we have yet made sense of it. With my best regards,

The analogy doesn't concern shape but structure, and broad structure at that. What interests Plato in the threefold structure of the soul is not a "biological" analysis of the soul à la Aristotle, precise in all details, and it is obvious, to him and to an attentive reader, that the lower part, the epithumiai (a plural) is itself manyfold. The first thing he wants to state is that the soul is neither one nor dual: it might sound trivial except that, if you think of it, it is not as obvious as it might sound.

Not one: the unity in man is not given, the form of man is not some sort of entelechy, an ADN string that only has to develop, without much-a-do on the part of the developing man;

Not dual: we are not in a dualistic world, not mind against matter, body against soul, logos against flesh, or what you'd like; man is not the battlefield of two antagonistic principles.

And once you eliminate one and two, it no longer matters much whether there are three or more parts. The point is, there is:

• the logos, that must be one "by definition", which is god gift to man and is intended to lead, or at least show the way;
• the ability to choose, to decide, the part that makes man free: free to side with reason or with passions, with god or with matter; the part that will decide what man will be at the end of his becoming in time; the sphere of conflict and action;
• the rest, that is, these parts of the soul that relate to the bodily nature of man, to matter, feelings and the like.

What the analogy with the city says is simply that these three "levels" exist in the city as well, precisely because the city is not one man, but many men, each one having different priorities, goals and desires, each one having a soul in which one or another part dominates, so that the city has to deal with a majority of people who don't listen too much to reason, some who have wisdom and a taste for order, and some in between who might side with either one or the other group; seen from another standpoint, the city needs people to take care of its citizens' needs, food, lodging, and the like, people to defend it from within and without and guarantee it freedom, and people to lead it.

And whether in man's soul or in men's city, the choice must not be either... or..., either reason or passions, either the king or the people, but and... and...: how to give each part, each one, its due for the common benefit of the whole (one of the masterwords of the Republic is koinonia, community, harmony, getting along together, along the lines of the "participation" of forms with one another). Yet, this doesn't mean that the city is above man as a whole of a higher order: a careful analysis of the Laws (whose whole plan almost exactly parralels that of the Timæus) shows that the city has no soul of its own (even though it is an image of man's soul), and that the whole purpose of the lawgivers and rulers is the good of the citizens.

To: plato <plato@freelance.com>
Date : June 6, 1996, 20:46:30
Subject : Re: the city and the soul

I wrote:

>> Yet, this doesn't mean that the city is above man as a whole of a higher order: a careful analysis of the Laws (whose whole plan almost exactly parralels that of the Timæus) shows that the city has no soul of its own (even though it is an image of man's soul), and that the whole purpose of the lawgivers and rulers is the good of the citizens.

Christopher [Planeaux] replied:

> I was following this argument until I arrived at this part. Perhaps there are steps missing...?

> If the city is an extension of man, which I think the _polis_ was/is, then I do not see how one can claim the city has no soul (using that term loosely, I might add). The polis is the men which fill her!

What I meant to say, and I know I'm walking on a thin edge, is that Plato is no totalitarian who would justify anything in the name of "the superior interest of the state". Sure, men must live in society, that is, in "cities". But it is the end of the city to make more citizens of all three classes happier, provided each one stay in his place and doesn't try to do what he is not fit to do (I know, who is judge of that, etc., but we are talking about a goal, and precisely, in the Laws, looking for the best practical way to reach it), not the purpose of the citizens to be sacrificed to some good of the city, different from their own good.

It is in that sense that I said that the city has no "soul" of itself, no "superior" existence to which man should submit. What he should submit to is "justice", inside and with his fellow men, but justice in that sense is the "idea" of man, not of cities.

Let's put it another way: the city is a purely "temporal" thing; it only exists in the world of becoming, as a construct of man's reason in the material world. Man, on the other hand, is more than his body and has (is) an immortal soul; and his whole purpose in the time of his bodily life is to build the being of this soul, what it will become in eternity. So let's say there is no "immortal" soul of the city man would have to build. The city is only one of the means for men to organize so as to help one another to build their own beings, their own immortal souls, not that of the city.

Yes, there is an "ideal" city. But the ideal city is a "form", not a soul. Unlike each man's soul, which has to be built (according to the one "idea" of man, which is "justice"), the "form" of the ideal city doesn't have to be built. It exists already, as it is a "form". It only has to serve as a model, a goal, to which our (temporal material) cities should "participate". My point with the parallel between Laws and Timæus is that, when comparing the plans of the two dialogues, one find that, everywhere it is question in the Timæus of the soul of the world, the parallel in the Laws deals with the souls of the citizens, not the city (1). But this would lead us too far...

To: plato <plato@freelance.com>
Date : June 8, 1996, 05:30:46
Subject : Re: the city and the soul

Christopher writes:

> On Thu, 6 Jun 1996 Bernard <bernard.suzanne@polytechnique.org> wrote:

>> What I meant to say, and I know I'm walking on a thin edge, is that Plato is no totalitarian who would justify anything in the name of "the superior interest of the state".

> If this is true, and I do not think it is, then Platon preceded popular political thought by 2,000 years.

So what? Would that be the only thing on which he was ahead of his time? wasn't he ahead by 2.300 years on feminism? And are you sure we have passed him on all topics?...

> The idea that an "individual" possesses inherent qualities upon which the "state" cannot infringe is entirely post eighteenth century!

Is that what I said? If so, I misrepresented my thought. I knew I walked on a thin edge! I was not talking about "rights of man", but about goals, saying that the city was for the good of its citizens, not the other way around. I know perfectly well that Plato would accept some sort of lies on the part of the leaders, or deportation of criminals, that he was not in favor of "freedom of speech", and the like. And I know that trying to make people happy against their will is the first step toward fascism. And I think he was well aware of how hard that is without giving way to tyranny. But I still think that this is what he was trying to do, trying precisely to find the narrow path for doing that without falling into tyranny (and he says himself somewhere in the Laws that the shortest path, but not necessarily the best, would be a good tyrant).

> I was always under the impression that one of the strongest criticisms Platon had against the Sophists was that they were not of any particular city.

> And, I was always under the impression that one of the strongest criticism Platon had against the poets was that they were imitators, tied to particular things "of the city" and not the city itself.

> This is even brought out in the Timæus, I believe, when Sokrates claims that sophists are neither wise nor politic because their "uprootedness" makes them unable to represent statesmen or philosophers, and poets cannot praise their cities or citizens because they wholly dependent on the things where they were raised (Tim 19d-20c).

Because I say that the city is for the good of the citizens, does that mean that people don't belong to any city?... On the contrary! I said that for Plato, man is a political, a social animal (one more steal of Aristotle), and that he must live in a city, but that this doesn't mean he must become a "cell" within a body-city that would be the only thing that counts. If the city, as I said times and again in my post, is for the good of man, it means man can only reach his good within a city! And I say, in another post, that Hippias is presented as the paradigm of the "injust man" precisely because he wants to play alone, doing all he needs by himself...

> In short, again, I think the city-built-in-speech of the Politeia is descriptive of the individual, not prescriptive as a specific goal.

Again, the whole purpose of the Republic is to show that it is impossible for man to be what he is meant to be, to reach his "ideal" either as an individual only or as a purely "external" citizen. The Republic describes the ultimate "form" of man, which is justice, both internal and social. And it is impossible to describe a fully just man without describing the "just" city he lives in...

(1) See the comparison of the plans of these two dialogues in the post called Platonism, a fresh look (part 4). (back)