Migrated from my prior site “Philosophia” with some editing and additions
The City of Pigs
Plato’s “City of Pigs,” which appears in Republic II (369a et seq.), has a greater thematic importance for the discussion of justice in the Republic than is sometimes recognized. Ironically, the starting point for the discussion of justice in the Republic was to be the creation of an ideal city in which justice could be seen “writ large.” What eventually becomes known in the dialogue as the city of pigs is the first attempt made to arrive at such an ideal. It will be shown that, although it is discarded, this first attempt at an ideal republic in many ways provides the foundation for the discussion of justice in the remainder of the book.
Socrates’ Initial, Moderate City
The most outstanding feature of Socrates’ first city (his original simple, rustic city) is its moderate character. Created by need, as Socrates says any gathering of individuals into a society must be, it is a city in which each gets just what he needs, and provides for the whole according to his ability. To accomplish this, each citizen is to develop a particular skill and to strive toward excellence at that particular craft. It is a city which accepts that each has his own natural abilities and that not all its citizens will have equal abilities. By the combined contribution of all its members, it is able to serve all its members’ moderate needs.
It is a city with two main social classes, consisting, on the one hand, of tradesmen or semi-skilled workers (craftsmen, farmers, builders, sailors, herdsmen, weavers and merchants) and general laborers on the other. Together they produce the “right quality” and “right quantity” (371a) of goods, which coincides with the moderate requirements for the health of the city. There is a sense in which the austerity that moderation might sometimes seem to impose is part of the city’s health. Socrates even pictures the citizens as drinking moderately (372c). By contrast, Socrates pictures the unhealthy city as one that has grown fat with things Socrates considers immoderate, such as rich sauces, and other “luxuries” that go beyond Socrates’ image of rustic simplicity and moderate scarcity.
It might be wondered why no discussion of possible social tensions or of inequality arises, as, for example, between merchants and farmers. Presumably, it is because Socrates imagines that all will be adequately provided for by doing what is best suited to their natural abilities. Moreover, immoderate excess, which is the starting point for injustice, has not been introduced into this “healthy” (372e) city and, in theory at least, no one has acquired a desire or expectation of more than they need. Socrates imagines that all will be adequately provided for since it is a city organized “according to nature.”
But most of all, it seems that moderation is ultimately the key. It what holds a society together in a harmonious order for Plato. Since injustice arises precisely where the spirit of moderation is broken and the city becomes “feverish” (373a), it might well be inferred that moderation is linked to justice. In the present context, it is certainly the determining factor behind ensuring harmony among the citizens (cf. 371e-372a for the notion that justice is linked to a harmony of the parts of the city with one another and 372e-373 where excess is linked to injustice and war (disharmony)).
The city of pigs passage comes to a close at 372c. Glaucon objects that such people would “feast without relishes”; that they would, in view of their diet, be like pigs, feasting only on “noble cakes” made of barley and wheat flower. Socrates, in turn, admits into the city, and only when pressed, such things as boiled roots, acorns, and beans. Where Socrates imagines such conditions as productive of a kind of rustic health and vigor, Glaucon sees a city that lacks the elegance and sophistication one would expect to find in an ideal republic. Glaucon’s point might, again, be taken to be that even if such a city is moderate, it is deficient in certain respects. From a certain point of view, such a life might well be taken to impose to impose limitations on human life. Why not strive for a life of comfort and peace if at all possible? Perhaps, it could be said that whereas Socrates sees the need to impose a kind of limiting discipline to “train” human nature, Glaucon sees that very discipline as a limitation upon the potential for a better and easier way of life. The wants of the individual are set in contrast to the good of the whole in their opposing points of view.
Finally, another objection arises from the very spiritedness of Glaucon’s rejection: that human nature is such that it always wishes to go beyond moderation where it can. Socrates seems to suppose that by keeping the citizens ignorant of any immoderate things they lack their desire will be held in check. One wonders how long such ignorance could last. An analogy to an Eden-like scenario suggests itself. If Socrates is correct that immoderate desire is always the beginning of social disharmony and injustice, are human beings not, then, always the creators of their own disorder?
The Luxurious/Feverish City
Its opposite, what Socrates calls a luxurious city, is an example of excess leading to a feverish condition. Desire for what is beyond the mean leads to an ever-increasing need for greater and greater acquisition and acquisitiveness until, fueled by a desire that seemingly has no longer any connection with the basic needs of the body, the result is war and injustice. With a touch of irony, Socrates says, in passing, that the city will require farm pigs for the first time. Perhaps the pig, with its consumptive nature, may be taken to indicate the sort of inhabitants that the city must have in both a literal and figurative sense. This desire-pushed-to-excess is described in another way as a “fever.” It is this metaphor that provides a key to understanding the role of the Guardians within the polis. The Guardians are, in fact, figures that moderate the feverishness of the luxurious city and, in a sense, its physicians. As will be seen, the analogy of feverishness works in tandem with that of the need to maintain the health of the body of the state.
Toward the Mean and Political Justice
In connection with this, Socrates says at 444D of book IV, that disease, the opposite of health, is produced by a disharmony in the body. It is, more precisely, an ordering of the body that is contrary to nature, in which the relationship between elements that normally stand in a relationship of mastery and being mastered has been upset and a new unnatural order has been established in its place. By contrast, the virtue or excellence (arete) of the body is, of course, linked to good order and harmony, which, as in the case of a Lyre, involves the proper tuning of strings in relation to one another. The two analogies intersect at the notion of a proper or natural ordering that leads to virtue. The guardian is thus both a kind of physician and and someone with a well-ordered and harmonious soul. Right ordering, in turn, is also the basis for justice in the city; a connection that was hinted at in Socrates’ initial temperate and healthy city, but gets more fully articulated where the parts of the soul are related to the different social classes in the Republic.1
Thus, the guardians play a rehabilitating and moderating role within the feverish city. One might suspect that their function is to undermine the “progress” of desire in the luxurious city and indeed this must be true to some extent. Consider Republic 442A, which reads,
[T]hese two [the rational and spirited parts of the soul] thus reared and having learned and been educated to do their own work in the true sense of the phrase, will preside over the appetitive part which is the mass of the soul in each of us and the most insatiate by nature of wealth. They will keep watch upon it, lest, by being filled and infected with the so-called pleasures associated with the body and so waxing big and strong, it may not keep to its own work.2
Again, further on at 442C-D we find Socrates saying that both in the case of an individual and in that of the city, it will be
wise by that small part that ruled in him and handed down these commands, by its possession in turn within it of the knowledge of what is beneficial for each and for the whole, the community composed of the three.
[Glaucon] By all means.
And again, was he not sober by reason of the friendship and concord of these same parts, when, namely, the ruling principle and its two subjects are at one in the belief that the reason ought to rule, and do not raise faction against it?3
The virtue of soberness certainly, said he, is nothing else than this, whether in a city or an individual.
However, this deserves more careful examination. What, it might be asked, is Socrates’ intention in creating the guardian class? Is it a retrograde one designed to return the city to an earlier state of rustic simplicity? Or has Socrates simply abandoned such an ideal? Notice that the very spirit of philosophy that Socrates cherishes is never mentioned as having a presence in his city of healthy rustics; there is merely a simple, unquestioning piety and reverence for the gods in place of intellectual pursuits. Nothing, even in the realm of intellectual questioning and investigation would seem to be lacking to the inhabitants of such a city. But again, how long could such a state of affairs really hold? Perhaps Plato might be read as tacitly accepting the corruptibility of such a city and of human nature by never actually rejecting the luxurious city as such and proceeding to modify it by immediately introducing the most essential moderating element for the whole: the guardians.
Indeed, if we take a broader, structural view of books II-IV, the guardians appear to enter the discussion as a mean between the extremes of the rustic and luxurious cities. But they are more than this: they are adjusters, tuners, and harmonizers of a society that is constantly changing, evolving, and indeed progressing.
References
- See Republic 441-442. Notice that in 441D, Socrates says, “We surely cannot have forgotten this, that the city was just by reason of each of the three classes found in it fulfilling its own function” Plato, Republic, Translated by Paul Shorey, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hall and Huntington Cairns, (Princeton: Princeton University press, 1989).
- Plato, Republic, Translated by Paul Shorey, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hall and Huntington Cairns, (Princeton: Princeton University press, 1989), 684.
- Plato, Republic, Translated by Paul Shorey, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hall and Huntington Cairns, (Princeton: Princeton University press, 1989) 684-685.
