1. Introduction

In this paper, I will discuss the problem of koinōnia in Plato’s Republic. Specifically, I will focus on how this concept is applied in considerations of the social organisation of the guardian class, especially in the proposal to abolish the nuclear family in favour of a community of women and children. I aim to reveal the subtle complexity of the social, ethical, political, and psychological aspects of this issue.

The textual basis for this analysis will be primarily Books III and V, which articulate the idea of common property and shared intimate relationships (Rep. 416d-417b, 457c-465d). A broader context for understanding is then provided by Books VIII and IX, which discuss in detail the destructive factors threatening the stability of the polis (Rep. 547b ff.). In this paper, I suggest a complementary reading of these passages that helps to highlight the fundamental psychological reasons for the radical rearrangement of the traditional household structure advocated in the “second wave” of the Republic.

2. Social organisation of the guardian class

Plato famously states that in the guardian class, “marriage, the having of wives, and the procreation of children must be governed as far as possible by the old proverb: friends possess everything in common”^1,2. This demand appears for the first time only in passing in Book IV (Rep. 423e-424a), to be revisited and thoroughly explored in Book V (Rep. 449c ff.). Following Adeimantus’ appeal, Plato lets Socrates approach these matters somewhat reluctantly and with an awareness of the radical nature of the proposed measures.

To begin our examination, we may ask how unusual and daring this measure is in the context of the times. Certainly, Athenian society was generally monogamous³. However, the Greeks knew from the constitutions of other cities and accounts of other peoples’ lives various provisions, including elements of group marriage (Herodotus, Hist. IV, 172, 180). They also believed that some form of group marriage prevailed in ancient times until Cecrops, the mythical king of Athens and a civilising figure, established monogamy⁴. Last but not least, the idea of shared women was given literary expression by Greek dramatists⁵.

What is important is the ideology behind Plato’s proposal to share women and children in the group of guardians. Plato makes a concentrated effort to demonstrate that this measure would strengthen the unity of the polis. The way to achieve this is to enhance the primacy of the common interest over the private. In this respect, Plato does not also enter unfamiliar ground; on the contrary, by emphasising the primacy of the common good over private interest, he defends a position widely accepted among the Greeks. The texts of Greek historiography, oratory or drama attest a clear opposition between public and private interests, with explicit support for the priority of common good over private aims⁶.

However, Plato’s treatment of this ideological imperative is indeed innovative. Plato offers a profound philosophical justification for his proposal and integrates it into the elaborate complexity of his thought. In the following pages, I will examine (i) the argument supporting the proposals of the social organisation of the guardians, (ii) the psychological background of these proposals, (iii) the socio-cultural context against which these proposals are defined and (iv) the position of these considerations in the broader scheme of Plato’s thought.

3. Unity of the Polis

As mentioned, the guiding aspect of the justification for the provisions in Book V is the unity of the polis. This assumption is articulated in the opening question: “Is there any greater evil we can mention for a city than that which tears it apart and makes it many instead of one? Or any greater good than that which binds it together and makes it one?” (Rep. 462a-b).

The desired unity is portrayed as a mental cohesion of the citizens, which is already evoked at the end of Book III as an ideology of fraternal kinship among citizens. From this is derived the first requirement for arranging the guardians’ life, i.e., the requirement of shared property and the prohibition of the disposal of physical gold (Rep. 416d-417b), a requirement that promotes togetherness and eliminates privatisation and self-interest in public life. The question now is whether and how this requirement relates to the proposal to share not only housing, meals, and material goods but even intimate relationships. I assume a close link between these measures. In this, I am critical of voices that deny continuity between the proposal to abolish private property and the abolition of the nuclear family⁷. Book V speaks clearly in favour of a unifying view. The connection between the proposal of common wives and children and previous measures is implied in Socrates’ words introducing the “female law”: “I suppose that the following law goes along with the last one and the others that preceded it” (Rep. 457c). These measures -i.e., common property and joint education- are explicitly recalled at 458c-d. The continuity of individual measures is then reiterated in the final assessment of the merits of the guardians’ living arrangements, where the community of women and children is presented in direct relation to the prohibition of private property (Rep. 464b-c).

Thus, we face a complex argument that pursues one central aim, namely, the unity and mental cohesion of the city. The multiple measures presented progressively graduate to secure this aim. Here, the focus is on the consistent elimination of possessive tendencies, reduction of greed and expulsion of envious rivalries. In this, Plato can follow the long tradition of Greek theorists who indicate greed as the chief disruptive element in social life. As Malcolm Schofield⁸ notes: “Plato echoed a long Greek tradition of political reflection, from Hesiod and Solon through many fifth- and fourth-century writers, in seeing greed as a prime force for destructiveness in human affairs, whether in fuelling stasis within a city, or in powering and then destroying imperialistic ambition, and in focusing particularly on the power of money”⁹. Money -or simply gold- is conceived here as the universal sign of possessive desire. The symbolism of gold is then applied on various levels. Here, along with the rejection of its physical form, gold sublimates into a sign of mental quality. It is the divine gold in the souls of the guardians (Rep. 416e). On the other hand, human gold represents destructive tendencies that threaten the integrity of the individual and the city.

Significantly, the passage in question combines political and ethical perspectives: the prohibition of the private property of the guardians ensures that “in this way, they’d save both themselves and the city” (Rep. 417a). A departure from this measure, on the other hand, will make them “household managers and farmers instead of guardians-hostile masters of the other citizens instead of their allies. They’ll spend their whole lives hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against, more afraid of internal than of external enemies, and they’ll hasten both themselves and the whole city to almost immediate ruin” (Rep. 417a-b). So, the risk of private property is that it introduces contentious rivalry and power ambitions into the city instead of concerted cooperation and makes it “many instead of one”.

The risk of privatisation and neglect to the whole is further addressed by the requirement to exclude as much as possible from the private sphere. The reasoning in Book V graduates to the requirement of mutual sharing, even in areas naturally considered the most private - sharing intimate relationships, family ties, beliefs, decisions, actions and feelings. The means to this end is “That all these women are to belong in common to all the men, that none are to live privately with any man, and that the children, too, are to be possessed in common, so that no parent will know his own offspring or any child his parent” (Rep. 457c-d).

The subsequent line of argumentation offers an attempt at a radical redefinition of understanding of what is one’s own. In terms of relationships with persons, the family is the place where we conceive of others as our own - our parents, our children, our siblings. Therefore, a rigorous attempt to mitigate all possessive tendencies must also reach this sphere: family relations must not be tied to an exclusive group of one’s relatives but must extend to the whole community of guardians. The use of the phrase “my own” is also undergoing a fundamental revision: strict unison is required in the utterance of these words: “Then, is the best-governed city the one in which most people say ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’ about the same things in the same way? - It is indeed” (Rep. 462c).

The same feeling of what is and is not mine leads to the required koinōnia at the mental and emotional levels. It is “sharing of pleasures and pains” -a kind of affective koinōnia- that is named the unifying element responsible for the unanimous and consonant emotional reaction of the citizens¹⁰. The phrase “koinōnia of pleasures and pains”, applied in the discussion of the “koinōnia of women and children”, thus points to a situation in which individual interests do not split the community, but the citizens regard the affairs of the whole as their own. Hence, by overcoming the individual relationship to one’s own, the door is opened to a shared and cooperative relationship to common affairs - to our own, so to speak¹¹.

4. Possessive tendencies in the soul

Now, why is an individual relationship to one’s own so threatening and why must it be so thoroughly regulated? We find the answer in the discussion in Books VIII and IX. Here, the relation to private and individual is set in a specific context. My interpretation intends to highlight a particular unifying element in these passages, labelled for examination as the “psychology of possession”. This thought complex is explicitly elaborated in Book IX, presenting a profound analysis of the soul’s inner dynamics. Along with a detailed description of the parallel process of psychological and political decline in Books VIII and IX, these passages can further elucidate the motivation for promoting a collectivist way of life in the guardians’ community.

The psychological background elaborated here operates with the tripartite structure of the soul. Socrates recalls the three parts of the soul¹² and specifies that to each part belong peculiar pleasures, desires, and kinds of rule: “The first, we say, is the part with which a person learns, and the second the part with which he gets angry. As for the third, we had no one special name for it, since it’s multiform, so we named it after the biggest and strongest thing in it. Hence, we called it the appetitive part (epithymētikon), because of the intensity of its appetites for food, drink, sex, and all the things associated with them, but we also called it the money-loving part (filochrēmaton), because such appetites are most easily satisfied by means of money” (Rep. 580d-581a).

The multiform desire inherent in the appetitive part of the soul is oriented towards satisfying a wide range of physical needs. Money is conceived of here as the common denominator of the desires of this part of the soul and as the universal means of providing for the whole spectrum of physical desires: “Then, if we said that its pleasure and love are for profit, wouldn’t that best determine its central feature for the purposes of our argument and ensure that we are clear about what we mean when we speak of this part of the soul, and wouldn’t we be right to call it money-loving and profit-loving?” (Rep. 581a).

Money and profit are thus presented as the universal object of epithymetic desire, and the appetitive part itself is accordingly named filochrēmaton kai filokerdēs. The uneasy control of these desires, which by their very nature want more and more, is already indicated in Book IV, which introduces the tripartite structure of the soul and refers to the interrelationship of its differentiated parts: “And these two, having been nurtured in this way, and having truly learned their own roles and been educated in them, will govern the appetitive part, which is the largest part in each person’s soul and is by nature most insatiable for money [emphasis added]. They’ll watch over it to see that it isn’t filled with the so-called pleasures of the body and that it doesn’t become so big and strong that it no longer does its own work but attempts to enslave and rule over the classes it isn’t fitted to rule, thereby overturning everyone’s whole life” (Rep. 442a-b).

The motives mentioned here are recalled in Book IX with new force: the initial analysis of desires (Rep. 571a ff.) builds on the previous distinction between necessary and non-necessary desires¹³ and focuses on those that by their nature have no inherent limit¹⁴ and constantly tend to increase so that they become insatiable (Rep. 573a-b). These desires have a pleonectic character typically, and their universal manifestation is the lust for money (Rep. 574a-d). The uncontrolled burgeoning of these desires then results in the disruption of all human life. It is shown in Book IX as the image of the parallel life of a tyrant and a tyrannical constitution. In the vivid imagery of Plato’s depiction, the tyrannical nature characterised by unrestrained greed is given the name Erōs. In this context, Erōs becomes a new acronym for the threatening potential latent in the epithymetic part of the soul.

The erotic madness of the tyranny, in effect, begins with a small but decisive step that initiates the gradual degeneration of constitutions and corresponding psychological types. It is the tendency to secretly hoard private property that afflicts the guardians of the best city: “Such people will desire money just as those in oligarchies do, passionately adoring gold and silver in secret. They will possess private treasuries and storehouses, where they can keep it hidden, and have houses to enclose them, like private nests, where they can spend lavishly either on women or on anyone else they wish” (Rep. 548a-b).

Where does this initial subversion originate? We can infer that it is latent in the amplified thymos of the guardians. Paul Ludwig aptly comments on this feature thus: “One’s sense of self can apparently be enlarged so as to infuse itself into people and things beyond the self, which then become one’s own. Thymos is capable both of savagery toward its own (tous oikeious) fellow citizens (destroying them along with the enemy when first introduced in Book 2, 375b-c) and of mildness toward its own, recognising a face that is dear (philēn) to it and protecting the familiar in opposition to the alien and strange (376b). The key seems to be educating thymos (like a noble dog, 375e) to consider those citizens as belonging to it (and to consider itself as belonging to them). The familiar or status quo (like the family of owners whom a dog also ‘owns’ as his) will then receive the affection”¹⁵.

Given these dispositions, the guardians will expand the scope of “their own” to the entire group of citizens when adequately trained. Thus, their thymoeidetic capacity to defend self-interest will embrace the whole city¹⁶; otherwise, they will begin to retreat into privacy and privately-owned property.

With this in mind, we can retrospectively assess the demands of strict limitations on private property and intimate relationships. It turns out that the deep psychological analysis into the structure of human desire underlies these restrictions. If acquisitiveness proves to be the guiding factor in the epithymetic part of the soul, and if its growth and dominance become the cause of ethical and political disruption, then the proposed measures in the community of guardians are understandable as a barrier to any increase in possessive tendencies.

5. Household and Property

Moreover, there is another dimension illuminating the need to treat the relationships within the household especially, so that they do not stimulate pathological greed. It is the traditional connection between the household and the pursuit of acquisition and preservation of the property -in this sense, a household is a place that stimulates possessive interests by its very nature.

Here, we can recall the socio-cultural background against which the Platonic vision is defined. A household is typically a place of concentration and maintenance of a property. This task is entrusted to the woman in her role as wife and housekeeper. The woman brings wealth to the house in the form of dowry and continues to look after the carefully guarded valuables in the home¹⁷. Xenophon offers a telling description of the woman’s role as a guardian of the domestic wealth in his Oeconomicus, emphasising the complementary role of the wife, who guards the goods inside the house, and that of the husband, who acquires these goods through his activities outside the house: “[H]uman beings live not in the open air, like beasts, but obviously need shelter. Nevertheless, those who mean to win store to fill the covered place, have need of someone to work at the open-air occupations; since ploughing, sowing, planting and grazing are all such open-air employments; and these supply the needful food. Then again, as soon as this is stored in the covered place, then there is need of someone to keep it and to work at the things that must be done under cover. Cover is needed for the nursing of the infants; cover is needed for the making of the corn into bread, and likewise for the manufacture of clothes from the wool. And since both the indoor and the outdoor tasks demand labour and attention, God from the first adapted the woman’s nature, I think, to the indoor and man’s to the outdoor tasks and cares” (Oec. 7,19-22)^18,19.

However, this close attachment of the woman to the domestic space has its dark side too: on the one hand, the woman guarantees domestic coherence, but, on the other hand, she also represents its greatest threat. Greek literature frequently portrays the case of a treacherous woman -most often a wife- who misappropriates the household wealth and eventually hands over the power of the household to another man. An apt example is Aeschylus’ Clytaemnestra, who, while verbalising the duties of a virtuous wife, initiates the disruption of domestic and political affairs²⁰.

This ambivalence multiplies the vulnerability of a household as a potential seed of ethical and political disorder²¹. Accordingly, Plato treats these risks very radically. He completely transforms the entire economics and erotics of the household. Just as he deals with the sublimation of gold, he also envisages the sublimation of erōs. In contrast to the intensified erōs destructively dominating the tyrannical soul, the transformed erōs of the guardians should drive intellectual desires and foster the pursuit of philosophy. On philosophical nature, we read: “when someone’s desires flow towards learning and everything of that sort, they’d be concerned, I suppose, with the pleasures of the soul itself by itself, and they’d abandon those pleasures that come through the body” (Rep. 485d). In this sense, erōs should unite the guardian community, being a bond that does not put personal passions in conflict with political interests but, on the contrary, in their service. In its pure form, erōs frees itself not only from the frenzied desire to usurp everything and everyone but also from peculiar possessive inclinations inherent both in oligarchic and timocratic natures.

6. Conclusion

Finally, let us attempt a few concluding remarks. The considerations examined so far reflect a constant feature that runs through the web of Plato’s thought. The risks of firm adherence to what we consider “our own” are revealed in other contexts, too. Elsewhere, we can recognise a strong echo of Plato’s characteristically philosophical nature: “[I]t is the nature of the real lover of learning to struggle toward what is, not to remain with any of the many things that are believed to be, that, as he moves on, he neither loses nor lessens his erotic love until he grasps the being of each nature itself with the part of his soul that is fitted to grasp it, because of its kinship with it, and that, once getting near what really is and having intercourse with it and having begotten understanding and truth, he knows, truly lives, is nourished, and-at that point, but not before-is relieved from the pains of giving birth” (Rep. 490a-b).

The vocabulary used is particularly reminiscent of the Theaetetus and generally in tune with the erotic dialogues²². The unifying point is again the rejection of the proprietary feelings. Purified erōs desires no exclusive possession; indeed, the objects of thought themselves resist being possessed. Therefore, we can observe a constant effort throughout Plato’s writing to promote the concept of a living, autonomous and self-supporting wisdom growing in the atmosphere of dialogical exchange and mutual sharing. The interpersonal character of pursuing wisdom makes it clear that adhering to our own beliefs, precisely because they are our own, is paralysing; genuine dialogue depends on the willingness to give up one’s own opinions when they prove false -it means the willingness to give up the affection for one’s own. Only by eliminating this affection is it possible to develop a shared understanding in a mutually stimulating exchange. The text of the Theaetetus reads thus: “And when I examine what you say, I may perhaps think it is a phantom and not truth and proceed to take it quietly from you and abandon it. Now if this happens, you mustn’t get savage with me, like a mother over her first-born child. Do you know, people have often before now got into such a state with me as to be literally ready to bite when I take away some nonsense or other from them” (Tht. 151c).

I conclude with this brief hint of a multi-layered use of the motif we have been exploring. Now, in the light of the widely applied “psychology of possession”, it turns out that the specific proposals for a community of guardians in Plato’s Republic are not an excess of social engineering but an integral part of a larger scheme of Plato’s thought²³.