From the Beginning to Plato

372 PLATO: ETHICS AND POLITICS
command whatever spirit or appetite demanded. Yet it is weak, both in that it is
directed by another’s, and in that it can lead spirit or appetite only in a direction
in which this is willing to go. Their courage or temperance is thus doubly
parasitic: it depends upon a judgement which echoes another’s wisdom, and
which only prevails because that wisdom makes sure that it meets no resistance.
Expulsion from Plato’s paradise would be the fall of these men: in the terms of
the rake’s progress that he sketches in Books VIII and IX, auxiliaries would
become timarchic men corrupted by honour, and artisans oligarchic, democratic
or tyrannical men corrupted by pleasure. It is by moral luck that they attain to
virtue of a kind. They are not fully brave or temperate but wholly unwise; rather,
they are brave or temperate in a way through a wisdom that they can accept but
not achieve. The unity of the virtues proper is reflected in a unity of popular
virtue.
Thus the virtue of individuals is a unitary condition of their psychic parts. How
is it needed to make them happy? The readiest answer to this question focuses
upon temperance, which is defined within the soul as follows: ‘We call a person
temperate by reason of the friendship and harmony of these parts, that is, when
the ruler and its two subjects agree that reason ought to rule, and do not raise
raise faction against it’ (IV.442c10–d1). Caring for all the parts alike, reason
makes them ‘friends’ (IX.589b4–5); parts, like people, will be ‘alike and friends’
if they share the same governance (590d5–6). Socrates remarks again that vice is
a sickness of the soul (IV.444e1), and can now explain. Eryximachus was giving
fanciful expression to a Greek commonplace when he defined it as the task of
medicine to produce ‘love and concord’ between the opposites (hot and cold, wet
and dry, and so forth) that are the elements of the body (Symposium 186d6–e3).
Mental health is the peace of mind that comes of parts of the soul that are friends
and not factions. Without temperance, a man is prey to conflicting desires,
perhaps subdued but not persuaded, which make him ‘a kind of double
individual’ (Republic VIII.554d9–e1). There is a good and bad slavery: while
reason is a benevolent master who educates desire, the appetites are a tyrannical
one who frustrates it (IX.577d1–12). Reason can hope to rule with consent because
of its altruism and intelligence. It was the soul’s original nature (X.611d7–e3),
and the origin of the mortal soul (Timaeus 42e7–8); so its attitude is paternalist,
like that of a farmer tending his crops (Republic IX.589b2–3). In indulging
necessary appetites (those we cannot divert, or whose satisfaction benefits us,
VIII.558d9–e2), it keeps appetite content. Being a master of language, it can
‘tame by logos’, persuading and not compelling (554d2). As reason can grasp
appetite’s concept of the pleasant, while appetite cannot make out reason’s
concept of the good, reason can take appetite by the hand, whereas a recalcitrant
appetite could only turn its back on reason.
So translated from the outer to the inner world, from society to soul, justice
becomes not a demand but an overriding need. The story of Gyges’ ring was a
fable of external accidents; in its internal essence, there is no such thing as