THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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forces or parts in his soul, desire, courage, and reason. These three active voices are arranged in order of value from bottom to top, thus there is a various order of
rank even here. Desire, courage, and reason are allocated to the loins, chest, and head; as each predominates they form the fiery character of southern peoples, the
bold one of northern peoples, and the level­headed character of the Greeks. They constitute the three kinds or directions of level­headedness among the Greeks: the
level­headedness of desire is obedience, that of courage bravery, that of reason wisdom. Greek virtue derives from level­headedness: the virtue of obedience thus
further constitutes the farmers, the virtue of courage the military class, and the virtue of wisdom the class of philosophical legislators. So in this way a state willed by
nature so to speak is supposed to arise, a state whose laws so little contradict nature that they complete and crown nature in the social stratum. Very much unlike the
Cynics and Hedonists, Plato consequently deduces no libertine Natural Right from nature, but a directly hierarchical one: the principle of suum cuique is contained in
physis itself. The third Book of the ‘Republic’ even maintains, in a literal sociological application of chemistry, that those who are suited to be regents have had gold
added to their souls, the warriors silver, and the traders copper and iron. So the suum cuique certainly seems easy; Plato also adds that as a rule children will resemble
their parents, so that ‘by nature’ a son from a lower class would only rarely fit into a higher one or even a soldier's child into the trading class. Statecraft in general is the
fusing of basic characterological­social circumstances into a harmonious whole, into the harmony of ‘justice’. We will often encounter the structure of Plato's ideal state
later on; for it is that of a longed­for ‘state morality’. The fact that (along with the slaves) there was the broad exploited mass of peasants and traders in this ideal state,
this pervasive immorality was cloaked by the ideology of a tiered justice; and the exploitation here, as is obvious, was ideologized by the doctrine of an innate servant
soul (of base metal). The upper classes are completely supported economically by the work of the third class, and their communism is not one of work but one of nonwork:
of the police and the learned Gerusia. It is not as if Plato did not want to ‘tax’ the lower class with the military and monastic communism of the upper classes, for
instance; as if it were too tough. He sees it instead as too noble, the philistines are not worthy of it, they must definitely continue to have cares, unlike the aristocratic
commune which has no cares any more, but takes care, of its state. Even the task which Plato assigns to the upper classes of watching ‘that poverty and wealth do not
creep into the state unnoticed’,