2.7: From Souls to Cities

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See 368a-369b. Socrates’ first step in addressing the challenge is to figure out what it is for a person to be just. But this is tricky, because, while you can observe a person’s actions easily enough, their thoughts, desires, intentions and so on are internal and difficult to observe. So how is one to identify this particular virtue of the soul, justice? By studying cities. Cities are made up of souls – of individual persons, skilled in various ways, working together, to some extent, for the common good. The conflicts, deliberations, and decisions relevant to the nature of justice are more out in the open. So Socrates proposes to devise an imaginary just city and then to study it. His hope is that justice will be easier to identify in the city, and that, having defined it there, they will be able to define it in the soul. This first step in the argument is not completed until the end of BookIV.

Does the word that gets translated “justice,” dikaiosune, mean one thing in the context of cities and something different in the context of souls? Consider how the English word “bank” means one thing in the context of rivers and something quite different in the world of finance. If the Greek dikaiosune were similarly ambiguous, then Socrates’ proposal to study cities for insight into souls may be deeply confused. What reasons might he have for believing that cities and souls are relevantly similar?