The Fourfold Virtues of Augustine & Plato & Confucius

Updated Aug 2015

In Plato’s Republic Book IV Socrates defines the four archetypal virtues of {justice, self-control, courage, wisdom} (these are the conventional translations, other translations have temperance instead of self-control, also bravery or manliness for courage). Plato derived these four virtues by analysing the qualities male citizens need to contribute positively to the community, and as a result they are sometimes called the male virtues or the political virtues. They differ, for example, from Thomas Aquinas’s three theological virtues which are derived quite differently, aiming not at communal success but rather individual self-development (the three theological virtues supposedly transform the self by allowing God to infuse idealism redirecting the individual away from the imperfect happiness of worldly success and towards the perfect happiness of revelation).

Approximately three hundred years later circa 50BC, surviving fragments of the Roman Statesman Cicero’s writing describe the Platonic virtues with the new Latin names {temperantia, fortitudo, iustitia, prudentia}. Cicero’s names are confusing because based on word sounds you might think the Latin word temperantia was used to translate what Plato called self-control, and the Latin word iustitia was used to translate what Plato called justice, but in fact this is not the case. How can we understand Cicero’s choice of names? Perhaps as follows: temperantia conveys Plato’s concept of justice with the idea of purity-of-temperament, fortitudo conveys Plato’s self-control with the idea of strength-of-character, iustitia conveys Plato’s courage with the idea of law-enforcing, prudentia conveys Plato’s wisdom with the idea of wise-judgement. 

In his writings of 388AD Saint Augustine of Hippo brought Plato’s four virtues to Christianity. Although Augustine preserved the underlying Platonic schema, he wrote about what he called “the four cardinal virtues of Christianity” in a more Christian style, emphasising the love-faith of the ordinary-follower instead of the knowledge-truth of the expert-leader, also explaining the virtues in a very readable way, and he used Cicero’s Latin names for the virtues, and the conventional modern English translations of those names are {temperance, fortitude, justice, prudence}.

But Plato’s writing is famously cryptic, how could Augustine have understood his four virtues? Augustine was an impressive philosopher who had studied the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus before his conversion to Christianity in 387AD. Indeed, after joining the Church, Augustine became the Church’s major theological heavyweight who used his knowledge of philosophy to interpret Biblical texts and solve disputes and cover gaps, and the Roman Catholic Church was largely fashioned around Augustine’s teachings. But to really understand why Augustine is such an enormously important figure in Church history, and why he brought the virtues over from Platonism, we should talk briefly about the early history of the Church and how Augustine changed it.

Even though the conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine in AD312 had tuned Christianity into potentially the dominant faith in Europe, Christianity sometimes struggled against more elaborate systems such as Neo-Platonism and Manichaeism (Persian Gnosticism). Whilst simple evangelical passion can get a religion started, if it is to become the dominant world religion it has to have an intellectual side as well. For example, a serious religion or philosophy has to answer questions such as: What happens to a person after death? Where does evil and suffering come from? What studies-prayers-exercises make us better? What are the human virtues and how do you define them? Before Augustine it probably wasn’t clear how Christianity answered these questions, it appeared to be a largely evangelical movement running on the charisma of the leaders and the sense of community in the flock, and that made Christianity look perhaps a bit simple-minded compared to Platonism and Manichaeism. Augustine’s impressive understanding of philosophy allowed him to transform evangelical Christianity into a religion of real substance.

So Augustine is an enormously important and well regarded authority figure in Christianity, although one of the things he wrote became very controversial, namely the famous Filioque: “And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified.” Revolutionary Orthodox scholars insisted that the holy spirit comes only from the Father, not from the Father and Son together. It seems to me they didn’t understand what Augustine was saying: Recall Plotinus’ divine trinity of {1.God, 2.Intelligence, 3.Soul} of which, I think, the more familiar trinity of {1.Mind, 2.Spirit, 3.Body} is a reflection. Surely the holy trinity is not Mind (The Father), Spirit (The Lord), Body (The Son), that is blasphemous, rather it is God, Intelligence/Wisdom (The Son or Philosopher King who understand god), Soul/Power (The Holy Spirit is the Tangible Lord or Political King who gives life as he rules over man according to the Son’s wisdom). So it seems to me that the revolutionaries are wrong, the spirit does proceed from the father and son, they had neither knowledge nor faith in Augustine, they didn’t understand the philosophy of the holy trinity and tried to understand it by fitting it to some other philosophical ideas they had read about. Over the course of this essay we will talk about these trinities in more detail and see them in action as we construct the four virtues.

Now let’s begin our examination of the four virtues by quoting from Chapter 15 of Saint Augustine of Hippo’s De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae†, but for the sake of convention, let’s switch Cicero’s Latin names for Plato’s Greek names, and let’s add in Plato’s three classes of body, sprit, and mind. Recall that Christian philosophers call temperance & fortitude “appetitive”, justice “wilful”, and prudence “intellectual”, which correspond to Plato’s three part of soul: body, spirit, and mind.

Note: people today find the human trinity of {mind, spirit, body} very confusing because New Age types today talk about “MindBodySpirit Festivals” etc, saying spirit is the “spiritual” part, and mind and body are the “material” parts. You need to forget this modern New Age talk, in fact spirit is like the energetic will that mediates between the heavenly knowledgeable mind and the earthly sentimental-existential body. For example, the body eats because it gets pleasure from eating, and the body loves because it gets pleasure from loving, but whilst eating and loving can be good, sometimes they are also bad. Because the mind understands meaningful ideas such as justice and beauty, it knows that some of the things the sentimental-existential body desires are bad, and some of the things it detests are good, and so it works with the intermediate spirit to manage the body, bringing the pleasures and pains of the body into alignment with the good. The famous image Plato gives is a shepherd, his sheep dog, and his flock. The flock is the body, the dog is the spirit, the shepherd is the mind. Whereas the mind is very still-thoughtful the spirit is energetic-active, like the sheep dog which runs around passionately, barking gently at the flock, tearing savagely into wolves. Without a shepherd the flock wander off in all directions and fall in with wolves becoming quite shameless, their capacity for thinking about human nature is extremely limited, they are prisoners of their sentiments and urges. The sheep dog doesn’t understand human nature in the way the shepherd does, but he has a powerful moral compass that gives him a perceptive strength the sheep do not have. Even though the sheep have no capacity for wisdom, they have a sort of effect-not-cause algorithmic intelligence, and they do all the practical things, not just farming and craft, but also painting and science etc. Consequently some scholars describe Plato’s {mind, spirit, body} as not only {wise mind, idealistic will, sentimental-existential experience}, but also {one king, few knights, many workers}, even {philosophy, religion, trade}.

So here the slightly modified text of Saint Augustine of Hippo’s De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae:

The four virtues are defined as follows:

[temperantia] justice is the virtue of the body which gives itself entirely to that which it perceives spirit loving;

[fortitudo]self-control is the virtue of the body which bears all things for the sake of that which it perceives spirit loving;

[iustitia] courage is the virtue of the spirit which serves only that which it perceives wisdom loving, and therefore rules rightly;

[prudentia] wisdom is the virtue of the mind which distinguishes with sagacity between what hinders and what helps.

The object of wisdom is not anything perceptible by body or spirit, rather the idea of God, the chief good, the highest wisdom, the perfect harmony.

So, combing the leadership of wisdom with the ruling of spirit, we may express the definition thus:

justice is the virtue of the body which keeps itself entire and incorrupt for God;

self-control is the virtue of the body which bears everything readily for the sake of God;

courage is the virtue of the spirit which serves only God and not the body, therefore ruling well;

wisdom is the virtue of the mind which makes a right distinction between what helps man towards God and what might hinder him.

Notice how part one and part two are joined together by the line “the object of wisdom is not anything perceptible by body or spirit, rather the idea of God, the chief good, the highest wisdom, the perfect harmony”. Notice how after that joining, justice is no longer simply that which gives itself entirely to that which it perceives spirit loving, it becomes the virtue that keeps itself entire and incorrupt for God.

Do you understand why that is?

It is because we have a chain of command from

(1) God

to (2) Mind/Wisdom [making a right distinction between what helps man towards God and what might hinder him]

to (3) Spirit/Courage [which serves only that which it perceives wisdom loving, and therefore rules rightly over the body]

to (4) Body/Justice/Self-Control [giving itself entirely to that which it perceives spirit loving / bearning all things for the sake of that which it perceives spirit loving]

Without that chain of command, the bodily or apperative virtues of justice and self-control would no longer perceive what spirit loves, which is divine by it’s connection to wisdom and god, but would rather perceive what the body itself loves, and in fact the body devoid of all connection to the divine is bad not good.

Manichaeism was associated with the idea that the body, the material, is completely demonic, and we should all seek to detach from it. But if everyone detached from the body, like one of those Buddhist Sages who spends all day praying and lives by begging, we would all starve because there would be no bread for anyone to beg.

Do you see that? Do you agree it seems irrational? Can you think of any argument in support of the idea that we should all give up our slavishly material communal work and seek salvation in prayer and study etc? Hint: what about the Garden of Eden? Anyhow, recall we said Plato’s virtues are defined by analysing the qualities male citizens need to contribute positively to the community, and as a result they are sometimes called the male virtues or the political virtues. Obviously we can’t search for such civic virtue if we disconnect everyone from the material! This idea of civic virtue is at the heart of both Ancient Greek Philosophy and, thanks to Augustine, Christianity.

So instead of dematerialised Manichaeism, in Catholicism we have the idea of The Eucharist, the transformation of the bread and wine into the flesh and blood of The Saviour by the power of The Holy Spirit. It is a metaphor for the connection between body and spirit and wisdom, the transformation from meaningless body to meaning entangled body, from non-being to being by the body targeting that which it perceives spirit loving, ie not the illusion the body would love were sprit not constantly moving through it keeping it from falling in love with itself.

Thus the chain of command from God to Wisdom to Spirit to Body makes the body good, thus going to heaven no longer involves “dropping out and tuning in”, rather the best way to self-develop is to do your job. Failure to understand this principle is disastrous for the political community and was at the core of Augustine’s famous fight against Manichaeism. Manichaeism type beliefs can take away a person’s love of work and politics, so that, for example, even if he goes to work his heart is not really in it because he does it only for necessity not love, and if he gets the chance he drop out and do nothing. Clearly then this makes for unhappy people and fractured civilizations.

However, of course, it gets a bit more complicated, because as we said earlier: without the chain of command the body would unplug from the divine, and the body devoid of all connection to the divine is bad. So Manichaeism isn’t completely wrong, in a sense the body is evil in of itself all alone, but you can see how dangerous this sort of philosophy of the non-existence of non-being can be.

Understanding this chain of command is the opening key to understanding the four virtues. If you are struggling with these all idea don’t be upset, it is hard grasp and you have to contemplate it. What you’re probably wondering right now is why we need this great division between the bottom two virtues of justice and self-control and the top two virtues of courage and wisdom, also why does the body unplugged from the divine become bad, and this is something we will talk about in more detail in a moment.

But, for a moment, think of bodily justice and bodily self-control as virtues closely associated with ordinary people, and spirited courage as the virtue of the elite ruling class, and intellectual wisdom as the virtue of the scholastic ultra-elite. Or, if you prefer Catholic analogy, think of justice and self-control as virtues closely associated with fishermen and carpenters, and courage as the virtue of the King or Church, and wisdom as the virtue of the Messiah or Pope.

Take a look at this summary table from Plato:

Summary Table From Plato:

Note: I have added the professions and intelligences and cities to the table to help you understand the ideas, I am certainly not suggesting that justice is something only farmers need have, nor that justice and self-control are inferior virtues, on the contrary in Book 4 justice is called the most extensive and most important virtue, so teaching the multitude what justice is and getting them to fall in love with justice is the key to saving mankind and building, as they say, a divine Kingdom on earth modelled on Gods Kingdom up in heaven. And this utopian dream is expressed by, for example, the many legends of Homer and Atlantis and King Arthur & The Holy Grail and a Golden Phoenix rising from the ashes and a Phoenician God growing men from the earth and changing the rotation of sun. And leveraging the man city microcosm macrocosm, we say utopia is the political equivalent of the sage’s nirvana, so even if we are all alone we can achieve it inside ourselves. But because this utopia is what all good human beings aim at, buried deep in political consciousness and popping up in powerful oratory everywhere is the idea of the End Of History perfect civilization at which mankind aims, the I Have A Dream Invocation, the Hegelian Transcendence, the Hesiod Golden Age, the Garden of Eden that occurs with the Coming of the Messiah etc.

Notice how the three parts of soul {body, spirit, mind} relate to the four virtues {justice, self-control, courage, wisdom}.

Now let’s try to tackle the difficult question: why do we need this body vs spirit-mind division, why does the un-ruled body go bad? There are lots of ways to explain it, I like to contrast Manslow’s pyramid with Jung’s Superego, but the way a lot of Christian Scholars explained it is as follows:

To understand the body think about the famous story of  Chrysippus’s dog which is mentioned in St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa. A dog is chasing a deer along a path. The dog looses sight of the deer but continues along the path in pursuit of it. The one path the dog is running along then forks into three paths, and the dog realises that the deer must have taken one of the three paths, and it sniffs at the first path but detects no scent, then sniffs at the second path but detects no scent, so it runs down the third without sniffing. Chrysippus concluded that dogs has a kind of reasoning ability, they can perceive paths, they can work out that that one path has become three and the the deer must have taken one of three, and they can reason that if not the first and not the second then the answer must be the third. However, Chrysippus and Thomas Aquinas and everyone else said this does not mean the dog is actually intelligent, it still lacks the ability to really think, it still lacks the ability to work with what we call Plato’s Forms or Aristotle’s Universals.

What do you think this dog is lacking that makes it somehow “unintelligent”?

Actually it’s quite hard to grasp, I once saw a whole room full of philosophers at Cambridge University completely flummoxed by this question, but if you think about it very carefully...

Such existential reasoning process can not answer the question: Is chasing deer wise or beautiful? All the dog knows is the bodily desire for deer and the bodily calculations to catch them. But imagine yourself chasing a deer, and now turn around and think backwards about questions such as is this wise or beautiful? These questions have nothing do to with the ability to recognise existential objects or do existential reasoning operations, they depend on the ability to perceive and reason what Ancient Philosophers call the non material reality woven into the physical illusion.

Let’s give a human example: there is accountancy, and at one level it completely soulless and you don’t need a Superego to solve accountancy problems. But imagine yourself as an accountant doing accountancy, and now turn around and ask yourself the strange question why did God invent accountancy and give me this work? To answer that, look: what is accountancy at the most fundamental philosophical level? Isn’t it “justice in accounts”? And isn’t justice a philosophical concept? For example, justice is orderly and honest, and orderly accounts don’t lie about where the money came from so you pay no tax, they strive to ensure whoever looks at those accounts understands what they need to understand from them. So by doing accountancy you are not doing something soulless after all, you are doing something that involves doing justice, and even though you might not be able to grasp the concept of philosophical justice as a young accountant working away on a boring Monday morning, yet when you go to bed at night and dream about your work they won’t be boring dreams with nothing real to think about after all will they, rather they will be dreams of justice.

How does justice get into accounts? That is the miracle of human life, somehow justice is transformed from a philosophical principle into human passions and bodily desires. For example, without greed there would be no reason to cheat, so the spirit of greed gives the philosophical principle of justice life. And greed in turn could not exist without bodily desires. Remember we said the dog chasing the deer can not answer the question is what I am doing wise or beautiful? It means the dog can not turn around and examine the passions the govern it’s life nor the wisdom those passions proceed from.

We have explained why the seemingly soulless profession of accountant can be divine, now let’s ask ourselves how the seemingly soulless profession of accountant can be demonic. It’s easy to understand— think what happens if unplug accountancy from the chain of command we talked about. If accountancy never takes communion it is like the person who never turns around and examines the spirit or wisdom of his profession and instead just gets better and better at profiting. Unlike the dog, whose nature remains rather fixed and consequently remains for the most part a nice animal even if it is not carefully attended, when human civilization is left unattended it deteriorates.

Let me give an example: Last time I was in Italy I spend a few days in the town of Bellagio. It’s a beautiful old town on the edge of a lake, and one of many things that left me shell-shocked was the beauty of the shop window displays. I was walking down old medieval alleyway when I came across a shoe shop. The shopkeeper had arranged shoes in colour coordinated circles, and I was looking at them thinking how quaint they looked when I realized it was a Nike shop. Somehow this man had made his shop selling Nike shoes into something that looked like it was in keeping with an 18th Century Italian village! It struck me that this guy could increase sales if he put a colourful Nike sign in the window that caught shoppers eyes, yet neither he nor anyone else in that town had though to do so. I though about what would happen if the shopkeeper went on a American Business School course and learnt about how loud signs can increase sales. Do you think he would he stand up and say “You crass money makers have no idea about beauty, I don’t care about making money, I care about God and Bellagio, I am faithful to our traditions”? Or do you think he would think to myself “These smart kids are right, if I put up a sign I can retire younger and buy a speedboat”? If he took the second option he would make lots of money but over time if others followed him eventually the whole town would degenerate and end up looking as tacky as everywhere else. Then Bellagio would loose it’s beauty and sales for everyone would fall, and his turning away from the spirit of his profession would have killed the goose that laid the golden egg, and when he died and arrived at the pearly gates he would realise his mistake and be filled with shame.

The philosopher Empedocles once said there is no consciousness in either the domain of pure love and pure hate. It’s an interesting theory that you can understand that by thinking about that shopkeeper in Bellagio. As long as everyone in Bellagio is completely united nobody there is going to think about how they could make more money by breaking the faith and putting up plastic signs. So in this world of pure love there is no good or evil, and because there is no good or evil nobody ever turns around and thinks about the meaning of their profession. But when the American Business School kid turns up and things start changing the dreams of the shopkeepers start filling up with battles between beauty and ugliness and justice and injustice. However, once everything has turned over and everyone is living in the world of pure hate the dreams stop because there is no longer any battle between good and evil.

Perhaps this is why we call the holy sprit fire. It is always trying to start a battle to keep us thinking about the things that really matter. Recall how Saint Augustine said “Courage is the virtue of the spirit which serves only God and not the body, therefore ruling well”. There is nothing existential or sentimental about the holy spirit, it rules over the body not for the sake of the body’s health or happiness, but for the sake of the God. It is as bored with Empedocles’ idea of pure love as his idea of pure evil, you see like the character in Plato’s Clitophon who is forced to agree that the love of animals for one another is often harmful not good, the love that Empedocles is talking about runs from body to body not body to god, likewise his hate pushes away from one body toward another, not away from one body toward god. The holy spirit, on the other hand, is divine love, bodiless love, the sort of love that passionately loves the spirit of England not individual Englanders. So the holy spirit constantly seeks a conflict between Englanders through which consciousness of England can spring to life, and without the holy spirit Englanders never think about the soul of England, only things in England and other Englanders. So the holy spirit looks out at the congregation and it cuts them up and rubs them against each other, filling everyone with dreams. And I say dreams because hardly anyone is conscious of what is going on around them, mostly their conscious thoughts are like that dog chasing a deer, I mean all ordinary people are generally aware of is bodily desires on one side and laws on the other, they are not thinking about the goodness or badness of those desires or laws, and they touch on such things only in their dreams.

What about wisdom? Philosophers talk about spirit as the sheep dog and wisdom as the Shepard, and the masses as the flock. Spirit takes orders from wisdom, wisdom is knowledge of god, spirit is opinion of god. How exactly we should define wisdom is one of the great problems of philosophy. Is the ultimate aim wealth? No, wealthy is a side effect of wisdom not an aim. Is the aim making the people wise? It’s a nice idea says Plato in one of his dialogues, but does wisdom seek to make everyone wise and wise in the same way? No. What then? It’s a question that is always left hanging for the reader to think about himself.

In summary: we have talked in this section about the chain of command and the difference between the bodily virtues and the higher virtues belonging to the elite. These ideas are not just Platonic, they crop up all over Ancient Philosophy. Confucian Philosophers also described four archetypal virtues called {li propriety, ren benevolence, yi righteousness, zhi wisdom}. Ancient Indian philosophers also described four virtues associated with their four socioeconomic casts, namely the virtues of the {Shudras agriculturists, Vaishyas merchants, Kshatriyas warrior-bureaucrats, Brahmins scholastic-enlightened}.

Now I am going to try to characterise the virtues with some examples from Confucian Philosophy.

Confucian Philosophy

I have chosen the following quotes from the Analects of Confucius to illustrate the virtues. The Analects is notoriously difficult to translate into English, and it’s notoriously difficult to interpret even the individual sentences let alone decode the entire schema governing the order of its construction, so I have edited the sentences slightly making them I think reasonably clear (so you don’t need the proverbial keenness of vision of the Argonaut Lynceus to grasp the image). 

Etiquette (li): Analects XI.1: If one has occasion to need rites and music, follow those of the rustics of former times, beware those of the bourgeoisie of latter times. But the Master said "None of those who were with me got as far as the door because they were all beneath me." A blemish on white jade can be polished away, a blemish on these words cannot be removed at all.

Benevolence (ren): Analects XII.1: The Master said "To overcome the self and return to the rites without others applying force constitutes benevolence" Yen Yuan said "Though I am not quick minded, I shall strive with all my heart towards what you have proclaimed."

Righteousness (yi): Analects XIII.1: The Master said "Set a public example for others to follow and do not let your private efforts slacken"... [XIII.28] To be a gentleman one must be aggressive on one hand and easy going on another, aggressive with people like yourself, easy going with the majority.

Wisdom (zhi): Analects XIV.1: The Master was asked "Can standing firm against impropriety, indulgence and slavishness be called benevolent?" The Master said "It may be called difficult, but not necessarily benevolent". Let not your thinking attach to a settled home.

I think these lines help illustrate the Platonic concepts listed in the table above.

Beginning with justice or etiquette we have to grasp the foundations of upright orderly clean civilized society. Confucius talks about the rites and music, by rites he means what Plato calls the laws and customs written and unwritten we must plant in the young with the hortatory skill. It’s not just about the wholesome values of country folk, think about the straightforwardness of the old fashioned good urbane salesman who doesn’t know the technical details, but knows what’s important at the broad brush level, and so when you go in to buy a car he picks out what kind of person you are at the broad brush level, and gives you what’s appropriate to that way of life. So if you’re a middle aged man with a family and you go to buy a sport car because you are having a mid life crisis, he talks you out of it putting you back on the straight on narrow, so in fact you don’t need to take any kind of responsibility for the decision yourself, you can just trust him to make it for you. And if your family car breaks down you can take it to the local garage and give the keys to the local mechanic who learnt his art from his father just as his son is now learning it from him, and he will fix it to the standard that’s appropriate to your life and give you a bill when it’s done, which you will in turn pay without a thought about whether or not it’s right or wrong because you have complete confidence both in his skill and honesty. And this wonderful life leaves you free to think about the things that really matter to you, ie your own work which has nothing to do with cars. And it all starts to go wrong when some fashionista type becomes a salesman and starts selling people the latest fashions, which is a kind of twisting of the important idea that we need a sense of "whose who in society" because it allows us to go straight to the relevant world expert whenever we need an opinion on anything rather than making the mistake of picking up on ordinary opinion. And as a result of this fashionista salesman hijacking our orderly civilization, instead a car being appropriate, it becomes a fake status symbol, and everyone starts getting excited like kids eating candy, and change and youth overthrow traditional and nobility. And as time goes by this culture gets more and more shallow, and accountants no longer describe themselves as "people who make accounts just, for example, by honestly reporting how much money an activity makes and from which location" but rather "entrepreneurial financial engineers". And these rather post-modern liberal atheist like accountants rub their hands in glee as the government abandons all the intelligent principles of the past and reduces everything to box ticking algorithms, which they then loop-hole delightedly, calling one activity another activity (eg all the money comes from IP leasing instead of selling), and claiming the money was generated in a place where it wasn’t generated (eg off-shoring). And so the wise old people who used to think about deep principles, and who laughed at rule books because they said "the only rule you can articulate that everyone can understand is do what’s right, and clearly nobody outside the profession could ever judge that, so the world must run on faith not law", all these people are squeezed out, and the world is taken over by shallow greedy cunning kids and slaves who spend their lives in court like vultures pecking at dead bodies. And so justice is something clean and pure and very divided up into people doing different things at different levels, and where it is unified into politically correct opinions about life that rule over many things, these must come from the most noble sources in an utterly non-democratic way. But this exquisite image of civilization is incredibly fragile, it can easily be portrayed by the sophists in the market square as arrogant and humiliating and corrupt, and once that mark is made against it the whole world starts sliding downhill, and perhaps unlike a mark on white jade which can be wiped away, nothing can stop the decline until everything is destroyed and civilization must start from scratch again. But, of course, if you give that example to the sophists they will spin it around and say: our right to crow and cackle is the Ming Vase, your electric dreams of utopia the bull in the China shop. Actually there is some truth in that, because like Plato’s story in Book One of the Republic about the man who realises he shouldn’t tell the truth or give back the spear he owes to a madman, there are other virtues outside the perfect principle of justice, and too much idealism spread too far can be dangerous, like the legend of ecstatic Icarus son of whirling Daedalus who flew too high and melted his wings.

What about self-control or benevolence? People today wrongly talk about ren as first and most important Confucian virtue, and it has become like the modern Christian mantra "all you need is love" to which the demagogues add "love starts at home so don’t be afraid to treat yourself and tell your lovers what you want for Christmas". But Plato explains in the First Book of the Republic that the benevolence Thrasymachus does not have is not a skill the expert focused on his art needs because benevolence is built into his profession. The doctor does not treat people people he loves them, he treats them because he has dedicated himself to doctoring. So if Thrasymachus immerses himself in the perfect organizational structure we associate with justice, his greed will be washed away by his professional skill and pride. But imagine telling your child not to eat ice cream because it is unhealthy, and then it gets on its iPad and finds an article about how ice cream is good for your health and comes back to you saying you’re wrong, and you roll your eyes because you know that what has happened is that its desire for ice cream has hijacked its reason, and driven it to search across the millions of crazy articles on the internet and come up with something that self-justifies what it wants to believe. Perhaps we could call this a failing of justice because the child is not submitting faithfully to the management of its betters but is arrogantly imagining itself as capable of expertise, yet at the same time it does remind us how powerful pleasures and pains are, and how they can sweep us away like the employee who is always late for work because he is lazy and always promises to turn over a new leaf but never does because he just can’t help himself. And these bodily instincts are constantly in conflict not just with our health and sanity, but also with our benevolence because a healthy civilization is a partnership that needs fairness. And some of the famous examples of lack of self control we talk about in economics are trade unionists striking and capitalists profiteering, and in both cases there is a turning away from the whole and indulgence of self. And this battle with the self becomes important when the labourer is no longer a creature of pure ID like the happy medieval serf tilling the fields around the manor house, but somehow gets separated from the community and becomes more like the self-aware EGO that stands apart like the craftsman who makes the tools alone in his workshop while the others enjoy using them together. And this battle with the self isn’t just about labourers and tool makers, also professional men who stop being able to devote their life to just one thing because something happens, such as the development of a market economy, and they need to do some advertising as well, thus becoming not just a doctor but also a maker of signs etc.

What about courage or righteousness? In Plato’s Republic Book 4 Socrates talks about making men courageous by breaking down everything they believe leaving them pure like bleached wool, and then building them up again from the foundations up, and he says that if our guardians are made in this way they don’t run like the wool that runs because it is dyed a particular colour before being perfectly bleached white. So the courageous man is like the special forces soldier who can be dropped alone or in tiny groups behind enemy lines, unlike the ordinary solder who is held together by relationship between himself and his good friends and comerades at arms. And in war time the courageous man famously develops out of the ordinary soldier whose friends all die, and he cuts his hair and leaves his humanity behind dedicating himself only to the sort of great causes the gods care about. For example, if we image self-control as battle between duty and self, then we could perhaps associate the heights of self-control with men such as Frederick I of Prussia and Horatio Nelson and Lord Cardigan. What Horatio Nelson calling "Doing One’s Duty" involved a spectacular level of suffering, but it was made possible because that’s how people in those days were brought up and how everyone onboard his ship had to live. But when the sailors of those times arrived in Tahiti and the pressure came off, they often went absolutely wild, as if the power that ruled their lives came from the zeitgeist around them. But that immersion in one another made them weak, sometimes charging to the death bravely but stupidly like gullible lemmings, never able to move silently but always singing drinking songs like football fans. On the other hand, think about the proverbial Ancient Samurai, deriving strength internally not externally, sharp not blunt, priding themselves on going first setting an example by fighting individually, not following up with a communal charge or holding fast in the trench which is what the patriotic soldier enjoys the most. And, of course, the courageous man is not like the "smooth operator" who smooches at the officers club while treating the non-commissioned with contempt, rather he is more like those Hollywood films that start with the five star general landing his helicopter outside Rambo’s little wooden hut and begging him to come out of retirement. And Rambo says: you kicked me out of the club years ago because even though I am gentle enough to little people I am aggressive with my fellow elite and they were horrified by my radical arguments, why do you want me back now? And the General replies: after the war started we quickly found out that all the smooth operators knew nothing, now you’re the only one who can save us, so please don’t sulk come onside and save us.

And wisdom? Each virtue is different but together they make a whole, so obviously wisdom is whatever is left over after you have identified the other three. But realise that each of the virtues we have been discussing is only intelligible not perceptible, and all I have been doing is trying to bring the Confucian sentences above to life with examples, but it’s not enough just to catch sight of some images of justice and self-control and courage, one has to grasp knowledgably what the infinity of different quotations and images we might have drawn have in common. For example, we could create an image of justice by making a film inspired by the P.G. Wodehouse’s "Jeeves" story, and in that film we could set an old fashioned privately educated Jeeves like character wearing a bowler hat and pin strip suit, and we could describe him as someone who is terribly nice but not very bright, and who consequently choose a career in financial services instead of medicine or engineering or something that requires real brains, and whose mantra is "my word is my bond", and who keeps your savings safe and sound avoiding any new fangled speculative nonsense. Yet our film is just a perceptible possibility, not the intelligible whole, so even if a person opens his heart and mind and grasps what is it we were trying to show— which might not happen for a whole host of reasons which came between us such as my viewers hatred of public schools boys or hatred of bankers, or being a public school boy with insecurity, or being a banker with pride— even then what he has still only ’an idea’ not the whole truth of the matter. And in the same sort of way Plato says in the Symposium most people chase beautiful things, but the philosopher must go in pursuit of the beautiful itself, moving from loving one body to many bodies, and then loving their souls, and eventually the whole and the sun. And so to the extend that all this writing, which takes so much work to make, illustrates just a few examples of different virtues, it fails to teach knowledge of virtue, and if people confidently twist my images in dreadful directions I didn’t anticipate and didn’t take pains to prevent them perceiving, then I will have not only failed to teach a few images of virtue, I will have filled people with ignorance. No wonder that writing is something so many of the great sages avoided, preferring instead wonderful philosophical conversations.