Superiority of Life: Plato’s Just: Individual

I. Introduction: Superiority of Just Life

Under the auspices of Plato it is meticulously established that leading the just, good and happiest life entails living the harmoniously balanced life, which satisfies in proper order the needs of three distinct and integral fragments of the self, as he affirms that a person does not possess a simple essence or form, but is constituted by several elements that comply with their various natural capacities or functions. Within the unjust individual, the separate divisions of the soul are not compatibly amalgamated and so the person in question cannot be at peace with themselves, and will be unable to experience human happiness or a sense of well-being of their whole entity, whereas if they should experience it, it would be to a grossly inadequate extent at best. Unjust persons frequently possess and accordingly materialize certain desires and fantasies, for instance those relating to unconscionable power and eroticism, which lead to the types of consequences, in particular anguish, trepidation, and frustration, that everyone prefers to avoid and that no persons regard as consistent with an absolutely happy human life. The life of the unqualifiedly just person is not impaired by these features, and apprehensiveness, frustration and chaos surely are not included in the price a philosophical character must inevitably pay for having a love or understanding of Forms or for rendering this devotion or passion a dominant role in their lives.

II. Harmony within the Tripartite Soul

Aside from the numerous and manifest remarks Socrates presents with respect to the superiority of the life of the just individual in Book 2 alone, for instance that it is better to be just than unjust (Plato, 380 B.C.,357b), justice must be welcomed for itself if one expects to be blessed (358a), the common judgment that injustice is more profitable must be refuted (360c), and justice by itself is advantageous to someone who possesses it whereas injustice is injurious to them (367d), Plato likewise expounds one of his initial and most consequential arguments throughout Books 2 to 4, which asserts that a person epitomizing justice functions in accordance with three distinct elements which constitute a hierarchical structure from bodily appetites, or the lower proportion of the structure, to reason, or the highest proportion of the structure, whereas the person embodying injustice does not and is therefore significantly less contented in life. The affirmation of concordant cooperation between the three elements of the soul accompanied by the analogy between health and psychic fitness serve to demonstrate that the just person lives the morally superior, more virtuous life and overall enjoys better living circumstances than the unjust human being.

Specifically, Plato commences by declaring that the rational part of the soul, expressly the mind or intellect, characterizes the thinking portion within each individual that discerns and distinguishes reality from ostensibility, judges what is a verity and what is a falsity, and generates wise as well as rational decisions in accordance with which human life is most suitably experienced. The spirited part of the soul, namely volition, is portrayed as the active portion, whose function is to execute the dictates of reason in practical life by performing whatever the intellect has determined to be most beneficial. Thirdly, the appetitive part of the soul reflects emotion or desire and signifies the portion of each of us that wants and feels various things, the majority of which must be either deferred or renounced in the face of rational pursuits if one is to achieve a favorable degree of self-control. Therefore, one is properly said to be just when the three parts of the soul work in consonance for the good of the person as a whole, and an individual's highest good indicates the sense of well-being and happiness