Plato’s City-Soul Analogy
Why does Socrates construct an imaginary city in Plato’s Republic before looking for justice in the individual soul? His stated reason is famously simple: justice will be easier to see in the city because the city is larger, just as larger letters are easier to read than smaller ones.
But does size really explain the analogy? A city is not simply a larger version of a human being, and Socrates has given his interlocutors no reason to assume that justice must be identical in both. What the city does provide is something rather different: an immediately recognizable example of complexity which can be used to introduce a much less obvious complexity in the individual soul.
The following extract considers what the city-soul analogy actually enables Socrates to do, and why Adimantus is so ready to accept it.
The city and the soul
Socrates suggests that it would be worth seeking justice in something large (the city) before looking for it in something small (the man). Adimantus enthusiastically accepts this false notion (369a4). Timocratic intellectual passivity is clearly to be seen here; the weak-sighted must rely on the keen-sighted person who tells them that the large letters are, apart from their size, identical to the small letters they have been told to read. Adimantus would appear to be prepared to accept the putatively keen-sighted Socrates’ determination that the justice found in the city is identical in all respects apart from size to the justice found in an individual man. Size, of course, is not Socrates’ real reason for the city-soul analogy; his aim is to illustrate the tripartite nature of the soul, which is usually considered a single entity. This difficult concept is more easily grasped using the analogy of tripartite cities, not because cities are bigger than souls, but because the complexity of cities is a commonplace. Even so, the complex nature of psychic aspects is concealed by a somewhat simplistic presentation of social strata. As I have argued earlier (pp. 62–63), Socrates creates unreal political constitutions which reflect the (dramatically) real psychic tripartite constitutions embodied in the model characters of the dialogue.
Extract from Chapter 6, ‘The Digression’, in Ivor Ludlam (2014), Plato’s Republic as a Philosophical Drama on Doing Well, pp. 170–171.
For more details, click here.
