| Notes on Plato'sand capable and care for the interests of all the citizens. |
| Notes on Plato'sand capable and care for the interests of all the citizens. |
1. The aim in founding the State should be not the disproportionate happiness of any one class, but the greatest happiness of the whole.
2. When the overseers of the laws and of the government are only seemingly and not real overseers, then they turn the State upside down.
3. The virtue of the overseers must not be seen in terms of peasants at a festival, who are enjoying a life of revelry, but of citizens who are doing their duty to the State.
4. Under the influence either of poverty or of wealth, workmen and their work are equally liable to degenerate. 421e
5. Wealth is the parent of luxury and indolence, and poverty the parent of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent.
6. If we have to go to war, our side will be trained warriors fighting against an army of rich men.
7. Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another; and in either there are many smaller divisions, and you would be altogether beside the mark if you treated them all as a single State. 423a
8. Our State, while the wise order which has now been prescribed continues to prevail in her, will be the greatest of States, I do not mean to say in reputation or appearance, but in deed and truth, though she number not more than a thousand defenders.
9. The proper limit for our rulers to fix when they are considering the size of the State and the amount of territory which they are to include, and beyond which they will not go is to allow the State to increase so far as is consistent with unity. 423b
10. In the case of the citizens generally, each individual should be put to the use for which nature which nature intended him, one to one work, and then every man would do his own business, and be one and not many; and so the whole city would be one and not many. 423d
11.If our citizens are well educated, and grow into sensible men, they will easily see their way through all these, as well as other matters which I omit; such, for example, as marriage, the having of wives and the procreation of children, which will all follow the general principle that friends have all things in common, as the proverb says.
12. The State, if once started well, moves with accumulating force like a wheel. For good nurture and education implant good constitutions, and these good constitutions taking root in a good education improve more and more, and this improvement affects the breed in man as in other animals. 424a
13. Arts and entertainment should be carefully controlled by the overseers, since they have a profound effect on citizens.
14. Uncontrolled arts and entertainments produce, little by little, a spirit of license, which, finding a home, imperceptibly penetrates into manners and customs; whence, issuing with greater force, it invades contracts between man and man, and from contracts goes on to laws and constitutions, in utter recklessness, ending at last by an overthrow of all rights, private as well as public.424d
15. Some of the details of life, such as civil and criminal justice, do not need to be legislated and controlled, since the overseers and the citizens will be able to develop laws as the situation arises.
16. The direction in which education starts a man, will determine his future life.425c
17. If God does not see that the laws aforementioned are preserved, the people of the State will become like sick people who through licentiousness aren't willing to abandon their harmful way of life. They will seek a remedy to their steadily worsening ills, always hoping that someone will come up with a nostrum which they can try. 426a
18. Isn't it also amusing that they consider their worst enemy to be the person who tells them the truth, namely, that until they give up drunkenness, overeating, lechery, and idleness, no medicine, cautery, or surgery, no charms, amulets, or anything else of that kind will do them any good.
19. Similarly, states that are badly governed warn their citizens not to disturb the whole political establishment on pain of death. The person who most sweetly courts those who live under this deranged regime and indulges them and fawns upon them and is skilful in anticipating and gratifying their obsessions is held to be a great and good statesman. 426c
20. The crafty ministers of political corruption allow the applause of the multitude to deluded them into the belief that they are genuine statesmen. 426d
21. We should have pity for the self-deluded person who cannot correctly judge his own "stature," who by listening to many others who cannot correctly judge "stature" declare that he is six feet tall, and believes himself to actually be six feet high. 426d
22. It is impossible to correct the ills of a deranged state merely by passing laws.
23. Statesmanship involves knowledge about states as a whole and the maintenance of good domestic and foreign relations. 428c
24. By the overseers possessing the wisdom of statesmanship the entire state partakes of the quality of wisdom. 429a
25. Courage adheres in a state through the overseers having the power to preserve, through the understanding they gained through their education of what things are to be legitimately feared, not abandoning this understanding because of pains, pleasures, desires, or fears. 429c
26. Temperance is the ordering or controlling of certain pleasures and desires, implied in referring to 'a man being his own master.' 430e
27. In the human soul there is a better and also a worse principle and when the better has the worse under control, then a man is said to be master of himself; and this is a term of praise: but when, owing to evil education or association, the better principle, which is also the smaller, is overwhelmed by the greater mass of the worse --in this case he is blamed and is called the slave of self and unprincipled. 431 b
28. A State may be justly called master of itself, if the words "temperance" and "self-mastery" truly express the rule of the better part over the worse.
29. The simple and moderate desires which follow reason, and are under the guidance of mind and true opinion, are to be found only in a few: those the who are born with the best natures and receive the best education. 431c
30. A State may be described as master of its own pleasures and desires, and master of itself, if the meaner desires of the masses are held down by the virtuous desires and wisdom of the overseers. 431d
31. Temperance to be the agreement of the naturally superior and inferior, as to the right to rule of either, both in states and individuals. 423a
32. Dialectic involves pushing forward even when there is no path and the wood is dark and perplexing. 432c
33. Justice is the practice of each person pursuing the occupation for which he is natrually best suited and not assuming he can do something for which he is unsuited. 433a
34.Justice is the having and doing of one's own. 434a
35. In terms of the State, justice involves the trader, the auxiliary, and the overseer each doing its own appropriate work. 434c
36. The investigation, which began in Part I of the Commonwealth began with the hypothesis that if we could examine justice on the larger scale--in the State--that there would be less difficulty in discerning her in the individual. Accordingly as good a State as possible was constructed, and the virtues of wisdom, temperance, and courage that we discovered can now be applied to the individual. 434d
37. The love of learning is the special characteristic of Greeks, while the love of money is the special characteristic of Phoenicians and Egyptians. 436a
38. We learn with one part of our nature, are angry with another, and with a third part desire the satisfaction of our natural appetites; and the whole soul comes into play in each sort of action.
39. Within the soul there can be a forbidding principle derived from reason, and a principle which bids and attracts derived from passion and disease.439d
40. The three aspects of the soul are reason, passion and spirit. 439e
41. We often observe that when a man's desires violently prevail over his reason, he reviles himself, and is angry at the violence within him. In this struggle, which is like the struggle of factions in a State, his spirit is on the side of his reason. We do not observe the spirit taking the part of the desires when reason opposes something. 440b
42. A person is wise who has in him that little part which rules, having knowledge of what is for the interest of each of the three parts and of the whole of the soul. 442c
43. A person is temperate who harmonizes the three elements, so they agree that the ruling principle of reason should lead the other two elements of spirit and desire. 442d
44. A man is just who does not allow any part of himself to do the work of another part or allow the various classes within him to meddle with each other. He regulates well what is really his own and rules himself. He puts himself in order, is his own friend, and harmonizes the three parts of himself like three limiting notes in a musical scale: high, low, and middle. He binds together those parts and any others there may be in between, and from having been many things he becomes entirely one, moderate and harmonious. Only then does he act. And when he does anything, whether acquiring wealth, taking care of his body, engaging in politics, or in private contracts--in all of these, he believes that the action is just and fine that preserves this inner harmony and helps achieve it, and call it so, and regards as wisdom the knowledge that oversees such actions. And he believes that the action that destroyes this harmony is unjust, and call it so, and regards the belief that condones this as ignorance. 443d
45. Virtue is the health and beauty and well-being of the soul, and vice the disease and weakness and deformity of the soul. 444e
