MEDICINE, PHILOSOPHY, AND SOCRATES’ PROPOSALS
TO GLAUCON ABOUT Gumnastikhv IN REPUBLIC 403C–412BImplications of the Medical Model
A fi rst interesting implication of the medical model is that virtue, like
bodily health, is not a constraining disposition that limits an agent’s ac-
tivity, but a state of proper functioning that is necessary for the perfor-
mance of a host of higher activities.^9 Vice, on the contrary, like disease,
is an inward condition that does limit or prevent the actualization and
operation of uniquely human activities. This idea is explicit in Socrates’
suggestion in book 4 of the Republic (4 4 4 d – e) that the virtue of righ-
teousness is a sort of health of soul, a proper relationship among the
powers of a soul and a proper functioning of the powers in union. It im-
plies that an important area of moral concern is the development of the
self, and that self-control and self-perception are of great moral impor-
tance.^10 And since virtue in this view enables persons to perform well the
crafts and practices of benefi t to the community, it supports not only the
individual’s own good but also that of the community. A second implica-
tion is that both health and virtue are conditions that can be apparently
but not really present. One may believe oneself or someone else to be
healthy when he is not; so one may believe someone to be virtuous when
he is not. One may have unfulfi lled needs that are being frustrated by
the wrong satisfaction of current desires, and one may be ignorant of
this, or one may deliberately avoid attending to it. There are forms of
pseudo-health and pseudo-virtue that only become manifest when body
and soul are tested in challenging conditions (see Gorgias 464a).
The point about challenging conditions carries us to a third in-
teresting implication of the model. A virtuous person lives well, in part,
because he is strongly resistant to vice. He is more or less invulnerable
to strong temptations to exchange higher for lesser values or to give in
to powerful corruptive infl uences in his social, cultural, and spiritual
environment, just as the healthy body is highly resistant to potentially
powerful corruptive infl uences from the bodily environment.^11 One way
in which one might be resistant to corruption is that one might know
in advance what bad infl uences one must be on guard against. And this
truth points to a fourth implication of the model. For just as there are
forms of disease whose symptoms, courses, and causes are common
knowledge to doctors and to health-minded persons, so there are forms
of vice whose symptoms, courses, and causes are common knowledge to
the wise, who learn them from literature or from experience. Socrates
explicitly mentions that vice has forms (ei[dh e[cei hJ kakiva) at Republic
445c1– 2, forms which he goes on to discuss in book 8 after being inter-
rupted at the end of book 4.
A fi fth implication of the model is that the Socratic practitioner
accommodates his questions and suggestions to the prejudices, inter-