This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
[434a]
of
one's own and what belongs to oneself would admittedly be
justice.” “That is so.” “Consider
now1 whether you agree with me. A carpenter
undertaking to do the work of a cobbler or a cobbler of a carpenter or their
interchange of one another's tools or honors or even the attempt of the same
man to do both—the confounding of all other functions would not,
think you, greatly injure a state, would it?” “Not
much,” he said. “But when I fancy one who is by nature
an artisan or some kind of money-maker
[434b]
tempted and incited by wealth or command of votes or bodily strength or
some similar advantage tries to enter into the class of the soldiers or one
of the soldiers into the class of counsellors and guardians, for which he is
not fitted, and these interchange their tools and their honors or when the
same man undertakes all these functions at once, then, I take it, you too
believe that this kind of substitution and meddlesomeness is the ruin of a
state.” “By all means.” “The
interference with one another's business, then, of three existent classes
and the substitution of the one for the other
[434c]
is the greatest injury to a state and would most rightly
be designated as the thing which chiefly2 works it harm.”
“Precisely so.” “And the thing that works the
greatest harm to one's own state, will you not pronounce to be
injustice?” “Of course.” “This,
then, is injustice.”“Again,3 let us put it in this way. The proper
functioning4 of the money-making class,
the helpers and the guardians, each doing its own work in the state, being
the reverse of that5 just described, would be justice and would render the city
just.”
[434d]
“I think the
case is thus and no otherwise,” said he. “Let us not yet
affirm it quite fixedly,6” I said, “but if this form7 when applied to
the individual man, accepted there also as a definition of justice, we will
then concede the point—for what else will there be to say? But if
not, then we will look for something else. But now let us work out the
inquiry in which8 we supposed that, if
we found some larger thing that contained justice and viewed it there,9 we should more easily
discover its nature in the individual man.
[434e]
And we agreed that this larger thing is the city, and so
we constructed the best city in our power, well knowing that in the
good10 city it would of
course be found. What, then, we thought we saw there we must refer back to
the individual and, if it is confirmed, all will be well. But if something
different manifests itself in the individual, we will return again
1 A further confirmation. For what follows cf. 421 A.
3 πάλιν, “again,” here means conversely. Cf. 425 A. The definition is repeated in terms of the three citizen classes to prepare the way for testing it in relation to the individual soul, which, if the analogy is to hold, must possess three corresponding faculties or parts. The order of words in this and many Platonic sentences is justified by the psychological “investigation,” which showed that when the question “which do you like best, apples, pears, or cherries?” was presented in the form “apples, pears, cherries, which do you like best?” the reaction time was appreciably shortened.
4 οἰκειοπραγία: this coinage is explained by the genitive absolute. Proclus (Kroll i. p. 207) substitutes αὐτοπραγία. So Def. Plat. 411 E.
5 ἐκείνου: cf.ἐκείνοις, 425 A.
6 παγίως: cf. 479 C, Aristotle Met. 1062 b 15.
7 The doctrine of the transcendental ideas was undoubtedly familiar to Plato at this time. Cf. on 402 B, and Unity of Plato's Thought, p. 31, n. 194, p. 35. But we need not evoke the theory of παρουσία here to account for this slight personification of the form, idea, or definition of justice. Cf. 538 D, and the use of ἐλθών in Euripides Suppl. 562 and of ἰόν in Philebus 52 E. Plato, in short, is merely saying vivaciously what Aristotle technically says in the words δεῖ δὲ τοῦτο μὴ μόνον καθόλου λέγεσθαι, ἀλλὰ καὶ τοῖς καθ᾽ ἕκαστα ἐφαρμόττειν, Eth. Nic. 1107 a 28.
8 In 368 E. For the loose internal accusative ἥν cf. 443 B, Laws 666 B, Phaedrus 249 D, Sophist 264 B, my paper on Illogical Idiom, T.A.P.A., 1916, vol. xlvii. p. 213, and the school-girl's “This is the play that the reward is offered for the best name suggested for it.”
9 ἐκεῖ though redundant need not offend in this intentionally ancoluthic and resumptive sentence. Some inferior Mss. read ἐκεῖνο. Burnet's <ἢ>is impossible.
10 ἔν γε τῇ ἀγαθῇ: cf. on 427 E, and for the force of γε cf. 379 B, 403 E.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.