-
4: City and Soul
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
93 4 City and Soul ThemajorityoftheconversationthatcomprisestheRepublicoccursbecauseSocrates is trapped by his own piety: unable to hear justice slandered, he agrees to defend the just life by showing the effects of justice and injustice on the soul. Glaucon and Adeimantus offer a number of formulations of this task. Glaucon desires to hear what the powers of justice and injustice are when they are in the soul, alone and by themselves, stripped of their wages and consequences (358b). Adeimantus, observing that no one has adequately argued that injustice is the greatest evil a soul can possess and justice, correspondingly , the greatest good (366e), fills in his brother’s argument. He calls attention to the effect on the soul of the customary opinion that justice is good but hard, namely, the development of the belief that happiness is best attained by gaining the reputation for justice while cultivating the unscrupulous advantage-gaining of the unjust (365a–366b). He twice asks Socrates not only to show that justice is stronger than injustice, but also what each does to the person who has them (367b, e).1 Adeimantus’s focus on the capacity of people to seem to be what they are not (and thus on the capacity of the soul to mask its condition) in order to gain the reputation of conditions which they ultimately do not possess, intimates the connection between the dialogue’s preoccupation with seeming, likeness, and image, on the one hand, and its investigations of soul on the other. At stake in the brothers’ requests to produce an account of the perfectly just and the perfectly unjust person, in order to judge which of the two is happiest, is precisely the question of the relationship between condition of soul and quality of life.2 How such portraiture is to be accomplished quickly becomes 94 | Republic a topic of conversation. Socrates’s initial response to this task is to call attention to the imagistic character of an account of justice and injustice that proceeds by way of creating portraits of perfectly just and unjust men: “My, my,” I said, “my dear Glaucon, how vigorously you polish up each of the two men—just like a statue—for their judgment” (361d).3 In making their requests of Socrates, the brothers reveal themselves to be susceptible to assumptions about the unjust life, assumptions that have a profound impact on the iconography of justice and injustice that is to be produced in the subsequent conversation .4 Both of their speeches treat the effects of virtue and vice as external to the people who possess them, imposed on them only by the social and political circumstances in which they find themselves. The unjust person is presented as unassailable and impervious to his possession of virtue and vice, indeed, as capable of flourishing in his possession of vice on the grounds of the assumption that the unjust person is more likely to achieve happiness than the just. Such a person is viewed as sufficiently untouched by the conditions that he brings about as to be able to bask in the riches and rewards that follow upon his injustice; implacable, unperturbed, and serene in his wealth and corruption. It is with this vision of tyranny that Socrates must ultimately contend, and because Glaucon and Adeimantus also assume that justice and injustice are conditions of soul, and further that it is by having such conditions that one can be said to be just or unjust and to live a corresponding life, arguing against their vision of tyranny requires investigating the corruptions of soul. The brothers request an alternative conception of the relationship between the soul, virtue and vice, and quality of life, one which makes convincing the claim that it is good to be just. Their allusions to the divergence of appearance and reality, their identification of facades that make studying the soul difficult , dictate a depth psychology that would counteract a variety of impediments to viewing the soul, not the least of which are the very opinions about soul summarized above. It is in this context of the need to discern the nature of psychic corruption and flourishing that Socrates conducts an investigation whose limitations he will note on more than one occasion. At the same time, the authority of the opinion about the happiness of the unjust, as the brothers have presented it, also requires the investigation of soul to reconfigure the relationship between people and the political environment in which they reside. In order to contest...