To this pointing our examination of the Republic, we've been concerned with setting out two questions. First, that questions of what is justice, and second, that question of is justice good? Now Socrates himself introduced that first question by seeing in Cephalus' remarks about old age, and the best way to face death, an implicit definition of justice, namely of telling the truth and giving back what you owe. Yet Socrates pretty quickly showed this definition to be inadequate.

Polemachus' attempt to save something of his father's definition of justice, now understood as giving to each what is fitting, namely something good to friends and bad to enemies, looks for a while as if it will do the trick. This is especially true when it's improved by dropping the requirement of harming enemies. As human virtue or excellence, human virtue could never result in the harm of anyone.

Yet it is at this point, that Thrasymachus bursts onto the scene, and the dialog is never really the same again. Now we have on the table, the much more radical question of is justice good? Is it, as he suggests, a kind of fraud perpetrated in every community by the strong against the weak? What is called justice, he says, is simply the advantage of the stronger, dressed up in high falutin terms of moral obligation, duty, and so on. These are terms that we foolishly follow, all the while serving not their own good, but that of another, the stronger.

As we've seen, both Glaucon and Adeimantus are dissatisfied with Socrates' responses to Thrasymachus, which succeed in shutting him down, but not in refuting him. Now for a reason not immediately clear, Socrates proposes to discover what justice is, and hence its goodness, by building "a city in speech," as he puts it. Yet not just any old city, but what turns out to be the vast city, even as he'll call it later, the city according to nature.

Why? Apparently the best community will also be the just one, and it will be easier for us beginners to spot justice first in the larger thing, the political community, before we look for it in the smaller thing, the individual.

Now this lecture will follow out Socrates' building of the best city, and then second, we'll try to discover along with him, the correct definition of justice. This will take us to the end of book IV of the Republic.

We'll note that before we turn to the proper definition of justice and the determination that it is in fact good, what you'd think of as the climax, even the end of the Republic, has in fact six more books yet to come. The Republic is less than half over at the end of book IV, when we get our official definition of justice.

Now this is one pretty obvious sign that Socrates' official response to Glaucon and Adeimantus at the end of book IV, is not free of problems. Socrates still has something more to teach us about justice than he can accomplish in the first four books alone. So of course, the Republic will continue.

So let's now turn to Socrates' building of the city, of the polis, with the political community. The city has its roots in the satisfaction of our most basic needs, food, shelter, clothing, in that order. Those needs we really can't meet easily or well as an isolated individual, so he says we naturally come together to form a partnership, where each person will perform a specialized task, farming, house building, shoemaking, and so on. They all share the surplus of their arts, with all the others.

So if we follow up on the logic, we see this city quickly grows from a mere 4 or 5 people, to a throng of people. Each of them contributes the sort of specialized skills needed to produce goods and services for each and every citizen. So we have in this city, farmers, craftsmen, tradesmen, importers and exporters, wage laborers, and so on.

Socrates goes so far as to call this a true or genuine city, where he means that all of its activities are rational, since they speak to our true or genuine needs. So such a city dedicated in this way, would be in a way, the true or genuine city.

Socrates now asks where justice is in our city, now that we've built it? Yet Adeimantus at least, can't quite identify it, perhaps because of the very good reason. It meets our bodily needs, yet could be said to operate on the basis of a strictly enlightened selfishness, rather than justice. After all, it amounts to a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." You build be shoes, I'll build you a bed.

Whatever we mean by justice though, we have to mean something higher or nobler than a kind of collective or prudent selfishness. That no community can, or at least does, rest satisfied with these genuine by quite low or uninspiring goals, becomes very clear through Glaucon's reaction to this city. He very famously calls this first city of ours, a city of pigs, of sows. He wants a city where there are relishes or delicacies available. Robert thinks it's not only that Glaucon wants a more refined way to satisfy the body, though he may well do, but wants a city in which something other, something higher than the satisfaction of bodily needs, is a matter of public, political concern.

So if from Socrates' point of view, this first city of sows is the true city, in a way, in the sense that the goals it meets are genuine ones, real ones, he knows full-well that all cities also attempt to speak to those concerns of ours that somehow transcend the body, and go above or beyond it. Let's give a contemporary example in the US, just to flesh this out. The market economy has done an extraordinary job of providing us with food, shelter, clothing, and so on. As well as a great many luxuries or relishes as Glaucon would say. We suppose it fair to say that there has never been a nation on earth that has provided so much physical comfort to so many, so easily.

Yet it's also true that the US is dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, that each of us, as human beings, is endowed with certain rights. This includes the right to life, yes, which the city of sows is also concerned just with as well. Yet the US is also dedicated to the right to liberty and freedom, which is a good deal higher than any merely bodily needs. So in the US too, yes we have to be concerned with the body, yet also with things that transcend bodily needs.

So with Glaucon's criticism, the dialog takes a new turn. The community will grow ever bigger, and it's no surprise that before long, they're concerned with both foreign conquest on the one, and domestic protection on the other. These are concerns that loom large very quickly indeed. In short, they need an army, not just farmers and tradesmen.

Here Socrates raises the classic problem with an army. How can we create soldiers who are ferocious enough to fight and die for the community, and yet be gentle enough to live in our own midst peacefully? It's with this problem that Socrates quietly introduces what will become "the" theme of the Republic eventually, education. The first goal of this education is to fashion guardians or soldiers, akin to noble puppies, as he calls them. That is to say, friendly to what is their own, and hostile to what is foreign, just like a noble puppy.

Now in this way, the second and central of the definitions of justice in book I, is in a way restored. That is, Polemachus' very political definition of helping friends and harming enemies. It's here too that Socrates first explicitly introduces the idea of philosophy. The guardians will have to be, among other things, philosophic. Though here that adjective seems to mean nothing much more exalted than having a certain kind of knowledge.

To anticipate the end of the Republic for a minute, if philosophy is here introduced as a necessary means to a political goal, eventually philosophy itself will become the goal to which everything else is but a means. Discovering the rationale for that change, lies at the heart of the mystery of Plato's Republic.

Now we can't go through in great detail the really remarkable education needed to shape these soldiers who are at once tough and gentle. It includes the training of the soul first, then of the body, and among the qualities this education should instill, the leading are of course courage, a certain gravity or seriousness, one shouldn't tell a lot of jokes, truthfulness, and moderation or self-control.

Yet in much of the education, Socrates advocates what's clearly pretty shocking or at least repulsive to us, we suspect, and that is censorship which includes music, literature, and art. Why? How could he justify this? His argument is that all of these things which we would call cultural, all have a profound affect on our soul. That means that they are properly and necessarily the concern of the good community. The latter can't simply let such immensely powerful influences on us, be left to develop willy-nilly.

So Socrates is here concerned, above all, about the accounts of the gods that the young people will hear. Why? There are in the great poets Homer and Hesiod, accounts of people fearing the afterlife, for example. In the case of future warriors, that sets a very bad example.

So in his act of censorship, as we'll calling it, he takes a pair of scissors, so to speak, to the classic texts of the Greeks, cutting and chopping at will. Maybe the most famous deletion that Socrates makes here, is found at the start of book III, concerning no less than Achilles, arguably the greatest of the Greek heroes. Now according to Homer, in the afterlife, Achilles famously regrets his decision to avenge the death of his comrade Patroclus, at the expense of his own life. Let's just read these very famous lines which Socrates also quotes here:

"I would rather be on the soil, a serf to another,
To a man without lot whose means of life are not great,
Than rule over all the dead who have perished."

Now no wonder that Socrates as founder here, would prefer that his noble puppies not read lines like this in Homer. They amount to saying that Achilles thought dying nobly for the sake of his friend, wasn't such a good deal for himself after all. That Homer includes these and other comparable lines in his poems, tends to confirm an interesting observation that Socrates had made early on here, apparently just in passing. There are "hidden meanings" in the poem that the young people don’t see, treating suggestion.

Yet the education of the guardians or the warriors is marked not only by keeping certain truths from the young, for example that even heroes sometimes fear death. In fact, the discussion of education here all but begins with the discussion of lies, of what Socrates calls noble lies. That means that there are in principle, noble lies, according to Socrates, ones that have a beneficial effect on those who hear them. Lets quote this important passage:

"Then it's appropriate for the rulers, if for anyone at all, to lie for the benefit of the city in cases involving enemies or citizens, while all the rest must not put their hands to anything of the sort."

One shouldn't lie, and only the rulers can. Now as this quotation makes clear, the best city will have a guardian or soldier class, but that class won’t rule. The best city then isn't the kind of military government. Yet then who will rule? It's just this question that Socrates raises once he's sketched the guardian's education. There are rulers, Socrates argues, who should be the best among the guardians. They must above all, love their city. Those who love it best, sees no tension between their own good, and that of the whole.

Now what Socrates has in mind here is not quite selflessness or self-sacrifice, but a kind of blurring of one's own good with the common good. It's in this context that Socrates suggests a necessity of telling a noble lie, of grand proportion. In fact, you have to fairly say that it's a real whopper of a lie.

First, he says everyone should believe that they were born of the earth. He doesn't mean this metaphorically or poetically, like mother Russia for example, but you actually, literally believe, that you were born of the earth. If the rulers themselves don’t quite believe this, then everyone else should. Why? The citizens will defend the city or country, because it really is their own mother they're to believe.

Yet that's not all, and it gets worse. The noble lie has a second part. It so happened that the gods mixed into the soul of each citizen, one of there metals. Gold in the case of the rulers, silver in the case of the guardians or auxiliaries, and iron and bronze in the case of the craftsmen. Now the purpose of this part in the noble lie, is probably clear enough. Each citizen is ordained by a god in the class in which he finds himself, and therefore he should accept it gladly. No revolutions, no revolts, in short.

There is however, this crucial concession to nature. It can happen, according to the lie, that a golden child will be born to a silver parent, for example, and so that child must be raised as a future ruler, not as a future soldier. Now toward the very end of book III, Socrates happens to mention, apparently just in passing, that the guardians will not have any possessions or private property. Why? That might introduce interests and concerns different from those of the community, and he notes too that they will live in common, without private families. Maybe it’s needless to day that these momentous provisions that he mentions just in passing, require more elaboration, which they will receive we we’ll see at the start of book V. Yet for now, the boys are content to let Socrates off the hook, not to press him on these controversial points.

It’s shortly after this, early in book IV, that Socrates announces we’ve founded our city, so lets look for justice in it. Now Socrates proposes the following somewhat odd procedure for discovering justice. Since their city is the perfectly good city, it will have the principal virtues in it, namely wisdom, moderation, courage, and justice, the big four.

So he says, lets identify all the virtues in it, except justice, and whatever is left over, in a kind of process of elimination, that will be justice. Once we've identified justice writ large, then of course we can see it clearly in the individual, justice writ small. Then we'll compare the two, justice in the city and individual, and if they're the same thing, our task will be complete.

Now you might well object here, and Thrasymachus would object if he hadn't been so thoroughly tamed by Socrates, that this is an example of the logical fallacy of begging the question. To assume that justice would be a part of the best city, doesn't that assume the very thing we're trying to prove, namely that justice is good?

More than that, Socrates' procedure here requires, as he notes, that the city be strictly analogous to the individual, or more precisely, to the individual soul. Now his official argument to this effect, runs as follows. The city has three parts that correspond exactly to the three parts of the soul. The city has rulers, the part that calculates and possesses wisdom. There are soldiers, the spirited part of the city that has courage. Then there are craftsmen, the part that has desires and is concerned with making money.

Turning to the soul then, Socrates argues it too has three, and only three parts. This includes reason, which governs, spiritedness or spirited anger, which prompts us to be courageous and is subordinate to wisdom, the reasoning part, and then finally each soul has desire, properly ruled by reason. So far do good.

Now many scholars have noted problems with this analogy. For example, is it really true, as Socrates maintains, that our spirited anger is always in the service of our reason, and never in the service of our passions or desires, for example? Yet for our purpose, it suffices just to note Socrates' own reservation, about this otherwise very neat analogy. He argues that the portrait a soul relies on, is inadequate. Let's quote this passage:

"Know well, Glaucon, that in my opinion we'll never get a precise grasp of it…"

(that is, of the question whether the soul has three and only three parts)

"…on the basis of the procedure such as we're now using in the argument. There is another longer and further road leading to it."

Now we'll try to speculate a little later in this lecture, why Socrates might rest content with a procedure he announces isn't adequate, and what the most important consequence of this inadequacy might be.

Robert suggests a procedure of comparing with one another, all the virtues that Socrates describes here. That is, lets compare political wisdom with wisdom in the individual, political with individual courage, political with individual moderation, and of course finally but most importantly, political justice with individual justice. In doing so, we'll make an interesting discovery. So lets go though each pair of the virtues pretty quickly, and then make some more general comments.

So first then, political wisdom. Socrates defines it as a certain knowledge, by means of which the city deliberates on behalf of itself as a whole. That makes a lot of sense, you can say it's sound political judgment. As for the individual, they are wise by means of:

"…that knowledge [in him] of what is advantageous for each part [of his soul], and for the whole composed of the community of these three parts."

In other words, the ruler's wisdom looks to the good of the city. The individual's wisdom looks to the advantage of his own soul.

Next is courage. Socrates define political courage as the power to cling to an opinion, but what is and what's not frightening, an opinion he says is instilled in us by the law. The individual's courage is the ability to preserve what's proclaimed by reasoned arguments, to be frightening and not frightening.

Political moderation Socrates finds in the ability of each of the three parts or classes of the city to do what it ought. The desires and spirited anger there, are as they ought to be, in relation to another. Both are ruled by reason. So the whole city can be said to be moderate because its passions are properly governed or ruled. Now individual moderation he says, is found when the two lower parts of the soul, desire and anger, are similarly ruled by reason. Again, so far so good.

Now we come to the climax of our inquiry, the discovery of justice. In the case of the city, Socrates identifies justice as each part or class, doing its own work, its own duty, and doing it well, or as he puts it, minding its own business. In this way, political justice seems very close to moderation, as he had described it. In any case, as for justice in the individual, it's the harmony that results from each part of the soul doing its own work, or minding its own business.

So now lets step back a bit. It would seem that the republic could end happily at the end of book IV. Socrates and his interlocutors have found the definition of justice to be each part of the city or soul minding its own business, or doing its own work well. Also, as Socrates himself goes on to say, if this is their definition of justice, hasn't the question of the goodness of justice, as he puts it, become ridiculous? That is to say, hasn't it become completely unnecessary? Why? If justice is equivalent to the proper working of the political community and of the individual soul, how could justice not be a very great good for each and for all?

Yet it's just here that we can begin to see problems and the reason why the Republic has to continue for at least six more books. We just said that Socrates and his interlocutors discover the definition of justice. Well this isn't quite correct. Together they discover not a definition, but two definitions of justice, one in the community and one in the individual.

Now Robert suggests that Socrates' entire approach here, by splitting the city from the individual, or the individual from the city, results not in a resolution of the problem of justice, but rather in its repetition or clarification of the problem. Recall what Thrasymachus has taught us. We need to know that the demands of the healthy or properly functioning community are the same as those of the health and properly functioning individual. In other words, we need to know that the duty or work imposed on us by the political community, on which political justice depends, is the same work, task, or activity, that would render us healthy as individuals or make our souls properly function.

In other words, if we are a dutiful soldier in this city, and so contribute to the common good or political justice, doing our own work well, then will our own individual or private soul, for that very reason, be made healthy and whole? To put the problem in the stark terms forced on us by Thrasymachus, in minding our own political business, or in carrying out our political duty, and so being just in that sense, are we thereby securing the good of our own soul, or are we just being a sucker, a dupe, or a worker?

We might suppose a perfect congruence between political duty and individual need, since remember that only those with silver in their souls will be soldiers. Yet of course, this neat solution to the problem, rests on what Socrates himself calls a lie, a noble lie. When Socrates turns to spell out the two kinds of justice, political and individual, he does something pretty radical. He all but dismisses political justice as a near phantom of justice, which is his term. True justice is apparently more the individual justice. So, far from being the concern or well-being of the political thing, it's entirely inward looking. The passage here is too important not to quote:

"In truth, justice was, as it seems, something of this sort…"

(namely each doing his own work)

"…however, not with respect to a man's minding his own business, but with respect to what is within, with respect to what truly concerns him and his own. He doesn't let each part in him mind other people's business. ….but really sets his own house in good order and rules himself. … In all these actions he believes and names a just and noble action, one that preserves and helps produce this condition [in his own soul]."

Now this is, to be sure, a strange understanding of justice. Whatever contributes to the health of my soul, is justice, according to this account. That could be the study of physics, for example.

In separating individual from political justice, Socrates has made his task easier in a way. He can describe the health of the community separately from the health of the individual. Yet that in a way avoids the big question, the challenge of Thrasymachus, of whether these things are compatible?

The same reservation can be made about all the virtues discussed here. Take wisdom for example. Political wisdom is the knowledge of what's best for the community as a whole. Individual wisdom is knowing what's best for me, as a whole unto myself. Yet the crucial question is if the content of each wisdom, is always and necessarily the same? The most cautious thing to say here is that Socrates hasn't proved that they are the same. Might not what's good for the community in a given circumstance, be very different from what's best for me?

Take courage for example. Political courage depends decisively on what the law says is terrible. Individual courage depends on reasoned arguments, on a logos. The law and reason may teach us to fear the same thing, yet must they always do so? It's Robert's suggestion that Socrates means for us to raise these, and comparable reservations, about his entire procedure. In doing so, we'll see with greater clarity, the problem of justice.

On the one hand, we sense that justice has to be a sense of duty and obligation to a whole that's greater than ourselves. This is beautifully captured by his account of political justice. Yet we sense too, that justice, whatever it is, has to be good, and even a very great good, not least for those who are just themselves. Again, this is captured beautifully by Socrates' account of individual justice.

Yet by the end of book IV, the challenge of Thrasymachus, or Glaucon and Adeimantus, they remain. Can the two senses of justice be put together into a coherent whole?

So only after all this, are we now ready to turn to the next section of the Republic.