96 PLATO
“So our dream has come to complete fulfillment; we said we suspected, right
from when we started founding the city, that by the favor of some god we were liable to
have gotten to an origin and outline of justice.”
“Absolutely so.”
“And what it was in fact, Glaucon—and this is why it was so helpful—was an
image of justice, that it was right for the natural leatherworker to do leatherwork and not
do anything else, and for the carpenter to do carpentry, and the same way for the rest.”
“So it appears.”
“And the truth is, justice was something like that, as it seems, but not anything con-
nected with doing what properly belongs to oneself externally, but with what’s on the
inside, that truly concerns oneself and properly belongs to oneself, not allowing each
thing in him to do what’s alien to it, or the classes of things in his soul to meddle with one
another, but setting his own house in order in his very being, he himself ruling over and
bringing order to himself and becoming his own friend and harmonizing three things,
exactly like the three notes marking a musical scale at the low end, the high end, and the
middle; and if any other things happen to be between them, he binds all of them together
and becomes entirely one out of many, moderate and harmonized. Only when he’s in this
condition does he act, if he performs any action having to do with acquiring money, or
taking care of the body, as well as anything of a civic kind or having to do with private
transactions; in all these cases he regards an action that preserves that condition and helps
to complete it as a just and beautiful act, and gives it that name, and regards as wisdom the
knowledge that directs that action. Anything that always breaks down that condition, he
regards as an unjust action, and the opinion that directs that, he regards as ignorance.”
“You’re absolutely telling the truth, Socrates,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, “if we were to claim that we’ve discovered the just man and the
just city, and exactly what justice is in them, I imagine we wouldn’t seem to be telling a
total lie.”
“By Zeus, certainly not,” he said.
“Shall we claim that, then?”
“Let’s claim it.”
“So be it,” I said. “What needs to be examined after this, I imagine, is injustice.”
“Clearly.”
“Doesn’t it in turn have to be some sort of faction among these three things, a
meddling and butting in and an uprising of a certain part of the soul against the whole,
in order to rule in it when that’s not appropriate, because it’s of such a kind by nature
that it’s only fitting for it to be a slave? I imagine we’ll claim something like that, and
that the disorder and going off course of these parts is injustice as well as intemperance,
cowardice, foolishness, and all vice put together.”
“Those are the very things it is,” he said.
“Then as for doing unjust things and being unjust,” I said, “and in turn doing just
things, isn’t it by now patently obvious exactly what all these are, if indeed that’s so for
both injustice and justice?”
“How so?”
“Because,” I said, “they don’t happen to be any different from what’s healthy or
diseased; what those are in a body, these are in a soul.”
“In what way?” he said.
“Presumably, healthful things produce health and diseased things produce disease.”
“Yes.”
“Then is it also the case that doing just things produces justice, while doing unjust
things produces injustice?”cde444a
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