When describing the ideal archaic and primitive polity of basic needs at the beginning of The Republic (371e-373), Socrates willingly accepts Glaucon’s definition that this society will amount to a “city of pigs”. In the English translation of F.M. Cornford, just after Socrtates says that “(these people) lead such a healthy life in peace, they will naturally to come to a good old age, and leave their children to live after them in same manner”, his interlocutor responds that “That is just the sort of provender you would supply, Socrates, if you were founding a community of pigs” [1]. That the ideal of the polity resembles a community of pigs is bathed in an important irony here, since as Leo Strauss once noted, this animal community is one in which there are no pigs, since this a community that is strictly vegetarian (the influence of archaic Orphic culture should not be ruled out from this passage).

But just like sluggish and stagnant pigs that roam a piece of land, this archaic form of city life is a proto-form of the kallipolis or the beautiful city, whose enchantment does not derive from external garments, but rather from a mediation of Justice that maintains social stasis or harmony within the passions. In this sense, the city of pigs is beyond a regulatory meditation of production understood as accumulation (although there is some exchange between goods and services), and for that matter it is a form of life that is beyond poverty and wealth. In fact, it is absence of a cycle of inequality either in the form of abundance or scarcity that defines the first communities in The Laws. Thus, we read in Book III 679c:

“Because of all of this, they were not intolerably poor, nor driven by poverty to quarrel with each other; but presumably they did not grow rich either, in view of the provining lack of gold and silver. Now the community in which neither wealth nor poverty exists will generally produce the finest characters, because tendencies to violence and crime, feelings of jealousy and envy, simply do not arise. So these men were good, partly for that that very reason, partly because of what we might call their ‘naivete’ [2].

The kallipolis that characterizes the beautiful city is thus the memory of the retreat from the machinery of legal expansion – the “too much law” syndrome that according to the Judge Neil Gorsuch characterizes the current state of empire of the administrative state – that for Plato took the form of continuous lawsuits and party strife in order to “hurt each other by word and deed” [3]. This means that the Beautiful City where pigs roam in the open is oriented towards Justice because everything is under the constraint of proportionality that mediatites between the soul and the body, and between actions and the good inherent in things due to their limitations in use. In other words, the city of pigs is an early emblem of the paradigm of the “rule of proportion”, a condition in order to nurture a healthy politeia. Thus, proportionality is a notion that allows not just for the metabolic organization of social life, but perhaps more fundamentally to the sensible understanding of nomoi as revolving around the territory, the attunement to music, and to the lawgiver’s institutional design to preserve a form of life.

If we can understand the city of pigs as a memory rather than as a construction of a future utopian society, it is because only in accounting for proportionality can the nomoi asymptotically enter in relation to Nature that has long been severed from the experience of human beings and the gods. This is why for Plato the truth of the kallipolis staged by the city of pigs belongs to the memory of the ‘Age of Cronus’ and not to that of Zeus. As the Athenian says in Book IV of The Laws: “The story has a moral for us even today, and there is a lot of truth in it: where the ruler of a state is not a god but a mortal, people have no respite from effort to imitate the life men are said to have led under Cronus; we should run our public and our private lives, our homes and our cities, in obedience  to what little spark of immorality lies in us, and dignify this dispensation of reason with the name of ‘law’” [4]. In this determination, the nomos is a memory of the happy life that strives to organize the community beyond the purpose of hostility and strife, abstract quantification and normative obedience (even though there might be necessary elements of these in the polity). Yes, it is true that law is always backwards looking – the process of adjudication needs a prior norm or principle to consider – but the sense of nomoi here is accounting for a priori of proportionality between separate regions of human experience.

The laws or nomoi as justice is not defined by the attempt to construct morally rational norms for adjudication, but rather to coordinate the proportionality dispensed (dianomē) between reason (nous) and the sensibility of the soul (daimones). Rather than thinking of the good as substance and fact, what is good is only in the proportion between soul and reason. Hence, the possibility of naming (eponamazo) of nomos cannot be understood as mere force of adjudication of any given legitimate authority, but as the mediation that guards against the unrestrained force of sad passions (greed, jealousy, resentment), as well as the disastrous consequence of political injustice through mere the exercise of public force that has been understood as the enactment of police powers to curb illicit actions.

What Plato calls the “little spark of immortality in us” is the very memory of the city of pigs; that is, a nomoi that refuses to conflates the community with the world, and that for this very reason it can imagine life beyond the regime of predatory and service driven social reproduction. If according to Oskar Panizza in his mythopoetic treatise, the pig in Western culture has stood as as paragon of fear, power, and untamable desire, it is not less true that the mythological animal was first and foremost symbol for what appears and shines first: “the pig is the Sun” [5]. And yet, for Plato there is a need for the nomoi because there is an archaic memory of the life beyond time and strife, which is the life of pigs that freely roam the perimeter of a space (a correspondence to the Gemeinwesen perhaps). It is this paradoxical emblem of archaic illumination and obscure remembrance that Plato registers as the “little spark of immortality”, where Justice survives not in the form of the restitution of a debt or injury (the principle of “owing what is one’s due”), but in the measureless proportion that binds soul and reason in order to keep on playing the music score of justice on Earth.

.

.

Notes

1. Plato. The Republic of Plato, ed. F.M. Cornford (Oxford University Press, 1945), 371e-373a, 60-61.

2. Plato. The Laws, ed. T. J. Saunders (Penguin Books, 2004), 679c, 78.

3. Ibid., 679d, 79.

4. Ibidl., 714a, 126.

5. Oskar Panizza. The pig in poetic, mythological, and moral-historical perspective (Wakefield Press, 2016), 4.