Justice as the Right Ordering in the Soul and the State. Essay 8 of Justice in the State: Comparisons between Plato’s Republic and the West

 

Socrates’ discussion of justice in Plato’s Republic considers how this cardinal virtue relates to the other cardinal virtues, and how these virtues relate to both the individual soul and the state in the same ways (cf. book 9). 

The four cardinal virtues are wisdom (prudence), courage (bravery), temperance (self-control), and justice. The first three relate to parts of the person: the soul, the high-spirited part, and the body.  This division of the person can also be stated with wisdom in the head, courage in the chest, and self-control in the stomach and genital areas.  Wisdom is the virtue to govern reason in the soul; courage is the virtue to govern one’s high-spirited part; and temperance is the virtue to govern the appetitive part, the body with its various desires.  Justice involves the right rule within each part, and the right ordering of the parts. Various disorderings of the soul are possible when one part is not rightly ruled by virtue and when the parts of a person are not rightly ordered.  A glutton’s not exercising self-control over the appetites and his letting the appetites rule over the two other areas of the soul might be an example.  We might say that such a person is internally disordered.

In Plato’s Republic, the philosopher-king embodies wisdom and exercises rule over the rest of society.  Following him are the guardians, the trained army and officials of the state who exercise courage.  Following them are the rest of the citizens, corresponding to the appetitive part of the soul.

Plato also discusses how different types of government correspond to different arrangements of these classes.  The government that comes closest to Socrates’ vision of the ideal republic is Sparta’s timocracy.  The ruling guardians in Sparta were what he calls the ‘auxiliary guardians’—the military.  The political, non-military guardians trained to rule the state with reason, including the philosopher-king, but were actually ruled by the auxiliary guardians.  Socrates argues that this relationship needs to be reversed.  Sparta’s timocracy, then, equates to the soul being ruled by courage over wisdom.

Corinth, at the time, was ruled by an oligarchy.  An oligarchy is rule by the few, and it is also typically understood that, unlike aristocracies and timocracies that may also be ruled by a few, an oligarchy involves the rule of a few in their own self-interest.  In both a timocracy and an oligarchy, the appetites are restrained, the first by force and the second by an order in society that protects private property.

Athens in the 5^th c. BC represented democracy among the Greek city states.  This form of government represents the rule of the appetites for Socrates.  The masses control the government, and they seek unrestrained fulfillment of their desires, which are considered justified in their own right as the exercise of freedom.

Finally, Syracuse had a tyrannical form of government.  For Socrates, this was the worst form of government.  It was a monarchy in which the monarch’s grasp of power serves his own ends.  Base desires rule absolutely, with nothing to hold them back.

Each of these forms of government have their faults, but if a philosopher-king, representing wisdom, is placed in power, the republic will be just.  Such a person needs to be placed in power, even against his own wishes, after having been trained in virtue and governance for years.  He must have no property beyond his basic needs, and he must govern for the citizens, not in his own interests.

Those who formed the government of the United States of America advocated a representative democracy, a republic, more along the lines of Pericles’ Athens than Socrates’ ideal republic.  They had experienced monarchy and determined that self-rule was better than rule by a fallible king.  Socrates’ version of the state assumed that there could be a perfect individual and therefore that person could be given absolute power.  The framers of the American Constitution sought to limit power and place various checks and balances on government precisely because they understood that humans are fallible in many ways.  The government that governs better is not the one that gives individuals power to enforce virtues on the rest of society but the one that reduces the power of individuals and the state because of vices.

What the West faces today is a different philosophy.  It is a post-Christian philosophy that rejects the idea that people have sinful appetites and desires: there is no sin.  Thus, it uses democracy in the way that Socrates feared: all desire is good in itself, and each desire is of the same status as the others.  It goes further than Socrates imagined, too.  The tyranny of desire allows desire to revise nature and define its own reality.  This is expressed vividly in transgender ideology and social control.  Not only is this a disordered society in that the appetites are unrestrained but also in that the appetites rule over reason.  Democracy, said Plato, will devolve into tyranny, and in our present situation, this tyranny is a tyranny of the anti-natural, transgender philosophy.  What we see in the West today is a new social experiment of the worst kind in which persons internally disordered are forcing on the state a similar disorder—unrestrained and unnatural desires.

A further development in the West is the replacement of antiquity’s cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, self-control, and justice with diversity, equity, and inclusion—each understood within the framework of critical theory.  This follows on from the Enlightenment’s shift from the cardinal virtues to a value system of freedom and equality (and fraternity, for the French).  Freedom, authority of oneself, became empowerment, authority of groups, which, in turn, became diversity. Equality, the treatment of all as equal, became equity, the special treatment of some. Fraternity, a sort of obligatory activism in social solidarity, incorporated inclusion of out-layers and came to be what is now the third member of postmodernity’s triad of values.  In its enforcement, it has equally become an exclusion, a social execution, of any not joining the revolution.  The Postmodern West is a child of the French Revolution, not the American.

Socrates’ timocracy was a meritocracy: people were put into their social roles based on their training and competencies.  Western society rejects merit in the name of equity: people are advanced on the basis of their group identities, whether natural (ethnicity, e.g.) or contrived (gender identities).  Such identities contribute nothing to the task of individuals in a society.  Equity’s new definition, thanks to Marxist theory, means the unequal advancement of individuals in order to advance a perceived social inequity among groups (i.e., to reverse intersectional discrimination).  It amounts to a reverse racism and a rejection of competence. 

Diversity as a cardinal virtue trumps other virtues: it is an absolute value.  Socrates’ interest in promoting people to their rank according to their merits also resulted in diversity.  A person from a lower class could advance, or one from a higher class be demoted, or a foreigner could be promoted in society because of his skills or wisdom, depending on where they best fit in the socialist republic that he envisioned.  The West’s notion of diversity would be for Socrates an example of the rule of the appetites—fulfilling our own desires—rather than rule by wisdom.  There is no wisdom in promoting a foreigner because he or she is a minority over a citizen with the skills needed for the job. 

Finally, in the West, ‘inclusion’ is not so much about welcoming others, as many might think, but about removing barriers of any sort that hinder the fulfillment of desire.  (The promotion of open borders has gone hand in hand with open moral borders in progressivism.)  It also involves enforced approval in the culture, institutions, and state that an individual rejects, such as affirming one’s chosen sexual identity over against their obvious biological identity.  Christianity, in particular, is viewed as a threat and an enemy as it says that there are such things as sins, there is a difference between good and evil, and there is truth, not just opinions that should all be ‘included’ or valued.  There is a God—we are not gods who speak our own little universe into being.  God the Creator has established right and wrong in His creation.  (We may not be able to turn an ‘is’ into an ‘ought,’ but God could and did as Creator; and we certainly cannot turn an ‘ought’ into an ‘is.’)  The West is involved in a self-scrutiny and emolument for past sins that leaves it incapacitated, unable to approve the good in its past.  The very notion of ‘civilization’ is rejected as discriminatory and abusive. Thus, ‘inclusive’ is actually a deconstructive and ‘cancel-culture’ category that wears a welcoming mask.