I recently finished reading book called Black Like Me, by John Griffin, a journalist who medically changed the color of his skin for six weeks in 1959 to experience firsthand what it was to be black in the deep South. I'll post on it at some point, but it triggered thoughts I want to address first.
Below is an essay I wrote summarizing Plato's Republic, particularly focusing on the composition and origin of his "best regime" and the relationship of justice to nature--both the nature of the city and the nature of our souls. This essay is not all comprehensive, long though it is. It hardly addresses the more metaphysical aspects of Books VI and VII. For this I apologize--please do level whatever comments you have on the whole thing, but especially on the more "philosophical" bits as opposed to the "political" parts (assuming you believe in the dichotomy).
Two notes and a request to keep in mind before the essay itself:
1. The translation I used was that of Allan Bloom. I am indebted to many of his insights, and make no claim to originality. That is not my desire, nor is it my aim. I aim to understand human nature, and Bloom helps me to understand Plato, who understood us well.
2. The citations are Stephanus notation, or pages of Bloom's translation and interpretive essay where applicable.
3. There is a difference between "what is best" and "what is best for human beings." Consider that the best of all things is the Divine Nature itself, and the best thing for mankind is knowledge of and unity with the Divine. Those are not the same. In the same way, it will help to think of the "best regime" from the outset as belonging to the former cateogory--the line between ideality and practicality can be argued, but let us not take Plato for a fool. Of course, feel free to post comments in disagreement.
Plato's Republic
The best regime is conceived in speech, born of Glaucon's dissatisfaction with simple arguments. His demand for a natural account of justice necessitates the “founding” of a regime based on nature. Such a regime is ordered remarkably like an ideal soul, and from it Socrates draws his arguments in favor of the just life as the best way of life.
The foundation for a discussion of the best regime is set in Book I, as various unsatisfactory definitions of justice are laid out. Cephalus turns over the discussion to his son quickly, who sets forth the first attempt at an account of justice. Polemarchus first says it to be giving to each what is owed, but soon refines his argument to name justice “[the art] that gives benefits and harms to friends and enemies.” Socrates quickly undoes this argument, for a thing harmed is made worse, and it is ridiculous to speak of making a man worse (i.e. vicious) by virtue. He concludes that “it is never just to harm anyone.” Polemarchus agrees, but the interlocutors are left no more knowledgeable than before, and with a feeling of having been spun in circles. Thus Socrates whets the appetites of his listeners.
Thrasymachus then springs forward, challenging Socrates not to refute, but to positively assert the nature of justice. Professing not to know, Socrates asks for Thrasymachus' own thoughts. “Justice is the advantage of the stronger” turns out to be just as flawed as the previous definition. Rulers, he says, set laws for their own advantage and declare obedience to them to be justice. Socrates maneuvers him into admitting penultimately that “there is no kind of knowledge that considers or commands the advantage of the stronger, but rather of what is weaker and ruled by it.” Thrasymachus, undeterred, asserts that injustice is what is to one's one advantage, and that perfect injustice is “mightier, freer and more masterful than justice,” paving the way for Glaucon's later arguments. He attempts to leave, but Socrates calls him back and returns to his first positive assertion: all rule is for the sake of the ruled, not the ruler. Why then should men be willing to rule? Socrates gives the art of wage-earning as what Bloom calls “the architectonic principle” inducing men to rule. It clearly is not up to the job, as Socrates himself points out—good men are unwilling to rule for money or prestige, they require the inducement of necessity and the penalty of having a bad ruler if the good will not take the job.
Socrates then takes up Thrasymachus' assertion that a life of injustice is stronger than and preferable to a life of justice. This question of the best way of life dominates the rest of the discussion. Socrates backs Thrasymachus into a corner and in fairly sophistical fashion concludes that justice must be virtue and wisdom and injustice by opposition vice and ignorance. Thrasymachus grudgingly agrees, and Socrates goes on to state that for a work to be done well, it must have its proper excellence. Justice is an excellence of the soul and living, ruling and deliberation are its works, therefore the just man lives well. The man who lives well is happy and wretched is he who does not, therefore the just man is happy and the unjust miserable. Thrasymachus is subdued at this point.
Unsatisfied, Glaucon steps forward and demands a firmer defense of justice. It has been praised, it has triumphed over injustice in the conversation with Thrasymachus, but he wants to know not merely the consequences, but the nature of justice, and to hear its nature defended as better than that of injustice. To this end he puts forward the “opinion of the many” that it is natural and good to do injustice, but men, being unable to get away with injustice, would rather agree neither to do nor suffer it than to suffer it, and this compact is justice. He further argues by the example of Gyges' ring that the just and the unjust man, if exempted from the consequences of their actions, would act exactly the same. He then sets up two men, the one perfectly unjust, to the point of having “the greatest reputation for justice” and the other perfectly just despite a reputation for injustice. The just man, the many will say, will be crucified in the end, “and know that one shouldn't wish to be, but to seem just.”
Adeimantus then steps in to add to his brother's argument that the only benefit of justice is reputation, arguing that the poets and religion only add reputation before gods to reputation among men, and that “if we are just, we won't be punished by the gods. That is all.” “There is not one,” he claims, “who has ever blamed injustice or praised justice other than for the reputations, honors and gifts that come from them.” He and his brother demand not only “the argument that justice is stronger, but show what each in itself does to the man who has it—whether it is noticed by gods and human beings or not—that makes the one good and the other bad.”
Socrates offers the solution of seeking justice on a larger scale, as one might seek a larger version of a text. He proposes to inquire into the justice of a city and having seen it, to find the justice of a man. Adeimantus agrees and Socrates begins. A city, he says, comes into being because man, by nature, is not self-sufficient. Men have different natures, and different aptitudes. A work is best accomplished by a man who practices only one art, so the city will abide by the rule of “one man, one art.” Socrates then builds a city, adding men and crafts, until he reaches what Glaucon derides as a “city of sows,” in which have simply enough for the needs of the body and no more. He desires luxury, which requires expanding the city, which in turn he dubs the origin and cause of war. The things which are not necessary to the life of the body seem to cause the greatest evils, but later, they will be the source of the greatest goods. From war arises a need for a guardian class, and the art of war finds greater importance than all the other crafts previously laid out, because the others depend on it. Guardianship will thus require greater leisure, skill and diligence, along with a fit nature.
The nature of a guardian in the city is similar to that of a “noble puppy.” Both must be swift and strong in body, and spirited in soul, that they may be able to fight well. In order that their savage nature may not be turned on their own, they must also be gentle, and able to distinguish between their enemies and their charges. This is done by learning one and not the other—such a nature must be a “lover of learning, since it defines what's its own and what's alien by knowledge and ignorance.” Therefore the guardian class must be philosophic by nature.
The best regime grows slowly in discussion, but here it begins to quicken and take a shape distinct from the previous conventions Socrates' interlocutors have known. The sound of the education, “gymnastic for bodies and music for the soul” is familiar, but the final form Socrates will give to it will be unlike anything found in the world. Music, as normal, comes before gymnastic, with tales being taught before exercises. Tales, Socrates says, are false speeches, with some truth in them. Children are not born able to chew solid food, nor are they any more capable of digesting straight truth. It must be fed to them in a form they can understand—but fed it must be. The education of the guardian class is vital to the city, perhaps the most vital thing, as Socrates says, for “at that stage it's most young and plastic and each thing assimilates itself to the model whose stamp anyone wishes to give it.” The stamp analogy is particularly apt—though the children (and later the auxiliaries themselves) cannot comprehend the truth itself, they can understand an image of it in stories, and just as care must be taken with wax both that its nature be pure and that the stamp in it be accurate, so too the stories the children hear must be in accordance with the ones they are to have later in life. The stories they hear must be good, and strengthen their natures for their later duties.
In this one sees what is meant by music. It is not simply melody, but the sum of all the arts of the Muses: literature and culture, stories and songs and myth. Music is the whole of the arts which shape the imagination and the hearts of men. The nurses are to “shape their souls with tales more than their bodies with hands.” The bad tales are to be thrown out and the good ones approved. This means removing many of the stories of Homer and Hesiod for being both false and bad, “just as a painter who paints something that doesn't resemble the things whose likeness he wished to paint;” false and fine tales are acceptable as they teach good things. The tales of gods doing injustice cannot be told to young children, even if they were true. The guardians must think it shameful to be angry or quarrel with each other, and cannot be allowed to receive wrong influences because “what [a child] takes into his opinions at that age has a tendency to become hard to eradicate and unchangeable.”
Appropriate tales must teach of the divine as it truly is: good, never harmful, and thus not responsible for evil, and thus not responsible for most of the affairs of men. What is best and strongest is also least mutable, Socrates argues, with regard to tools, bodies and gods themselves. The divine being the best thing, it must be unchanging entirely. Thus the poets' songs about gods transforming themselves and deceiving men must be done away with as false images.
The purpose of musical education in the best regime is to inculcate virtue and bring the soul to a proper harmony, and as the guardian class is to be courageous, it must not be exposed to stories which will create in it the fear of death or pain, but rather those which will cause it to fear shame far worse than death. So too the works of the poets about Hades must be eliminated, and laments for the dead allowed only for the men and women of the lower classes, so that the guardians will despise such attitudes toward death and be steadfast in the face of danger. “Speeches and deeds of endurance by famous men in the face of everything” are to be kept and praised for their effect on the souls of the guardians.
Interestingly, the musical education here begins to serve not only to form the guardians, but to replace the wage-earner's art earlier mentioned as the reason for the guardians to practice their art of guarding. A guardian in the best regime protects the city not for a wage, but because that is what he has been taught to hold as right and honorable. In speeches and music about men, the guardians are to imitate only those sorts of men they are to be, and only in the modes appropriate to them, because of the rule of one man practicing the one art for which he is best suited by nature. The guardians must not imitate anything other than their own nature, because “imitations, if they are practiced continually from youth onwards, become established as habits and nature.”
Speeches and plays about men are thus to be narrative when describing unworthy actions and only requiring acting and imitation for the worthy deeds and characters. Because of this, the style of plays will be mostly in a single mode and rhythm, because the changes are small. Again the best things are the least changing, and so good poetry will have only two modes: one for courageous and warlike deeds and one for moderate deeds of peace. Socrates points out after eliminating the many-toned (and therefore many-tasked and therefore excessive and unnecessary) instruments that the interlocutors have purged the city which used to be luxurious; Glaucon declares this a result of moderation—his previous desire for luxury is gone, redirected towards virtue. It was his soul, not his body, which lacked nourishment in the “city of sows.”
Not only the poets, but all craftsmen in the best regime will be subject to the standard of the good image: those who impress a bad disposition on their works will not be permitted in the city. Education is to produce the right kind of likes and dislikes; a man reared on beautiful things will love them and hate the ugly and ignoble things, so that before he can grasp reason, his heart will already be in line with it, and when it comes, he will recognize it. This balanced education will produce moderation, without the excesses of licentious or graceless things for the guardians to learn. The natural way of love, then, is a musical one and a moderate one, Socrates says, before moving on to the subject of gymnastic.
Gymnastic is to train the body, but it is not nearly as prescriptive as music. Socrates is careful not to seek too much precision, opting instead for a few simple rules. To prevent their being weakened, the guardians must not get drunk, receive gifts and sweets, or have “Corinthian girls”. They must not be too finely tuned in body, lest they be unable to withstand the vagaries of their campaigns. To make them flexible, he sets down that the soldiers shall have irregular sleep schedules, so that they may be vigilant like hounds, and that they shall only eat roasted meat, eliminating excess baggage on their campaigns—simplicity in their gymnastic, like the simplicity in their poetry, will produce health and moderation. Excess in music and in the care of the body produce licentiousness and illness respectively.
The sign of a degenerate city, then, is a proliferation of doctors and judges. “Excessive care of the body... hinders it just about more than anything,” as illustrated in the example of Herodicus, who, afraid to die, managed to reach old age by the physician's art, but achieved little else in his life. This is contrasted with a carpenter who “soon says that he has no leisure to be sick nor is a life thus spent—paying attention to a disease while neglecting the work at hand—of any profit... [He] returns to his accustomed regimen; regaining his health he lives minding his own business; if his body is inadequate to bearing up under it, he dies.” The second man has a job to do, and his life is of no value if he does not do it. A man who cannot live according to his nature thus may as well not live at all.
Doctors in the best regime, then, must practice medicine in this fashion, and being familiar with all kinds of bodies and diseases (even in their own bodies, for “they [do not] care for a body with a body...but with a soul”) care only for good bodies and souls, and let die the bad bodies as the judges put to death the bad souls. The judges themselves must be late to learn the natures of unhealthy souls, studying injustice “as something alien in alien souls, over a long time [becoming] thoroughly aware of how it is naturally bad, [making] use of knowledge, not his own personal experience.” The reason for such a harsh system is simple: the best regime is about the ideal way of life in accordance with nature. Those who cannot live according to nature have no place in it. Those who do live in it must be properly educated, their souls brought to a proper harmony.
Gymnastic tunes the body, but it also strengthens the spirited part of one's nature; if taken too far, or administered alone, it makes men savage. Music nourishes the philosophic part of a man's nature, but like fire applied to long to steel, too much of it softens the spirited part of man past the point of usefulness to soft weakness. Thus proper guardians will have both natures, and both nurtured in harmony, to produce courage and moderation together.
Having set down these “models of education and rearing,” Socrates next turns to “who among these men will rule and who be ruled.” He declares that the best of the guardians will rule and that these will be those most skillful at guarding the city. The best guards of the city must not only strong, but prudent and caring for the city. To care for it, they must love it, and “he [would] surely love something most when he believed that the same things are advantageous to it and to himself.” To this end, the young guardians must be watched, and those chosen from among them who most strongly and perseveringly hold the conviction that “one must do what is best for the city,” through all trials with grace and harmony. These are to be called the true guardians, and the rest of the guardian class Socrates dubs “auxiliaries” to this ruling class. As the auxiliaries were distinguished from the wage-earning class by their spirited nature, the wisdom of the rulers distinguishes them from those who are warriors simply.
To induce men to live in such an order, Socrates turns to the device of the noble lie. All the members of the city are taught that their education and upbringing were a dream, during which they and their arms and tools were made within the earth, their mother, who then gave birth to them. Thus they are to be bound to the land as their mother and to each other as brothers and sisters. A god, at this birth, mixed different metals into the souls of the different classes: into those of the rulers, gold; into those of the auxiliaries, silver; and into the souls of the artisans and farmers bronze and iron. Thus each man is to perform the task in accord with his soul's nature, and no iron or bronze soul may ever rule, for there is to be an oracle that the city will be destroyed if such is ever the case. The paramount duty of the rulers, then, is to watch the children and their education, ensuring that each nature finds its proper place in the city.
The lie makes visible the invisible differences in the faculties of men. In the best regime, there is no conflict between nature and convention, but rather convention reinforces and strengthens nature. The first half of the lie renders conventional love of a particular city natural. The citizens of the best regime ought to love their fatherland because it is their mother. The business about taking land for the city, and the resulting origin of the guardian class are thus nicely avoided. The warriors are given a reason to protect, rather than to oppress, their fellow citizens. Though the second part of the lie allows no individual to transition between the classes, on a generational level there is social mobility. Gold-souled children can be born to farmers, and artisan-children to guardians. These children are to be treated according to their natures, not their parentages, and because the differences in nature are difficult to accept, Socrates invokes the agency of a god.
The noble lie also removes the cause of faction by creating unity of opinion concerning who should rule. Convention is employed to make this unity seem natural and divine, not because it is unnatural, but because those who must be ruled cannot see who is truly wise, or why wisdom ought to rule. If they could, they would be rulers. Like the child who cannot grasp pure truth, but must receive stories, the lower classes and the guardians are given the lie which tells truth (or nature) in a false (or conventional) way. By its use, however, the city can be unified, and this is its greatest good: to be as a single organism, the whole feeling the pain of any part. The happiness of the city is the citizen's greatest happiness. Each feels the city to be just because he believes that each member of the city gets what he deserves.
With this lie in place as the capstone to the warriors' education, Socrates implements a few final measures to safeguard against the possibility that these guard dogs will turn against their flock. They are to be provided with shelter and clothing and their material needs so as to have no cause to take them from the other citizens. This property is to be entirely in common, as is nearly the entire life of the warrior class, who will eat and live together. In addition, they are to be forbidden to possess silver or gold and told instead that the divine metal in their souls is better by far, and that they must not pollute it by possession of mortal metals.
Adeimantus then objects on the grounds that the auxiliaries seem more like mercenaries without pay. He accuses Socrates of not making the guardians happy, particularly because they lack wealth and property. Socrates responds that the city is not organized for the happiness of any one class, but for the happiness of the whole, and furthermore, that a bad craftsman does not much damage a city, but establishing the guardians as not looking to the good of the city but to their own advantage would undo the city entirely. If the end is the happiness of the whole, the rulers and auxiliaries must each do their particular jobs, and “let nature assign to each of the groups its share of happiness,” though their own happiness may turn out greater than that of those with less virtue.
For the good of the city, they must guard against wealth and poverty, as these two things produce worse arts and worse men, either through idleness or inability to perform one's tasks. Furthermore, both introduce innovation, which is necessarily undesirable in the best regime. Just as the best things are unchanging, so is the best regime; the only change there can be from perfection is corruption. Guarding against poverty seems sensible to Adeimantus, but the prohibition of wealth confuses him.
War, he argues, is difficult to wage without wealth, especially against a wealthy and powerful enemy. Socrates' response is that the city will be like a well-trained warrior fighting lazy boxers with poor training. Such a scenario might well end in the warrior's favor, if he fights cannily. The best regime will be like a lean, ferocious dog among sheep. Who would choose to attack it, rather than the sheep? And if any would, the city will play its enemies off, offering to aid one against another, and allowing its ally to keep the spoils entirely. What enemy, Socrates asks, seeing nothing of value in the best regime, and being offered aid against its enemies, would choose to fight a war of no consequence and no benefit? The city will also send out the guardians to divide its enemies within themselves, seeing each enemy as many, divided along rich and poor and further within these, the guardians will offer the power and property of the one to the other and fracture their enemies before they ever mobilize against the fatherland.
This is the best regime's greatest strength: it is one. It is unified and integral, and in that respect it is the biggest of all cities, “even if it should be made up of only one thousand defenders.” This unity is what the rulers and auxiliaries must guard and defend. To this end, the guardians must share all things, including women and children. A city thus started will “roll on like a circle,” sound education producing sound natures. The primary task of the guardians thus turns out to be not war, but preventing innovation within the city itself, particularly in education and music, changes in which produce the greatest changes in the constitution of a city.
Because of the good education in virtue, the inhabitants of the city will need few laws at its founding, and “most of these things that need legislation they will, no doubt, easily find for themselves.” The practice of giving laws to address all wrongs is “cutting the heads off a Hydra” and to be avoided, because it accomplishes nothing in a bad regime and is unnecessary in a good one. With this the laws concerning religion are left to the Delphic oracle, and the city is deemed founded.
Socrates then turns back to Glaucon's first question, concerning the nature of justice. The city, he declares, if it has been correctly founded, must be good, and thus wise, moderate, courageous and just. If three of these can be found in the city, he argues, the fourth must be what is left over.
The city as a whole is wise because of knowledge concerning the good of the city, which is found in the rulers. It is courageous because of the spirited element, the guardians, and its power of preservation, just as a man is brave because of his spiritedness and not his appetites or any other part. Moderation is “a certain kind of order and mastery of certain kinds of pleasures and desires,” in the sense that a man is “stronger than himself,” by which is meant the rule of the better part over the worse. This is clearly true of the city as a whole—all the classes participate in moderation by being ordered as they are, with wisdom ruling and spiritedness and appetite (the artisans and farmers) submitting to rule. As stated previously concerning musical education, Socrates says that moderation seems to be a kind of harmony or unison—the city is unified in opinion concerning who ought to rule (and because it brings about this virtuous unity, the noble lie is fine, not base like the destructive falsehoods of Homer and Hesiod).
All that is left after this is the rule laid down at the founding of the city that each man must have one and only one function, “that one for which is nature made him naturally most fit.” Thus justice is “minding one's own business” in a qualified sense. Interfering with the three classes of the city will lead to its destruction, Socrates argues, which is the greatest harm and therefore the greatest evil one could do to one's city. Doing the greatest evil to one's city he names injustice, and Glaucon agrees. Justice, being the opposite of injustice, turns out to be each class doing what it is fit for naturally.
At last Socrates is able to return the discussion to Glaucon's initial demand for an account of the nature of justice in a man. Declaring that a thing is the same whether writ large or small, he searches for a justice in man the same as justice in a city. The human soul is found to have three elements in it, just as the city has; one part knows, another is spirited, and the third desires “pleasures and nourishment.” These three parts, in a well-ordered (and by implication well-educated) soul will serve the same functions as in the city. Reason rules over the passions and the spirited part is its auxiliary. Thus justice in a man is the same as in a city. A man with a rightly ordered soul “will be just and mind his own business.” Injustice in a man is next considered, and decided to be a wrong ordering of the soul. Justice and injustice are then established as health and sickness of the soul, just as health of the body is an establishing of its parts in a relationship of mastery and being mastered according to nature. “Virtue, then, as it seems would be a certain health, beauty and good condition of a soul, and vice a sickness, ugliness and weakness.”
With the nature of justice thus laid bare, Socrates moves to consider Glaucon's question as to which way of life is best. Glaucon interrupts him swiftly, declaring the obvious superiority of virtue and justice. He argues that if life is not worth living in a broken body, it cannot be conceived so if the “nature of that very thing by which we live is confused and corrupted.” Socrates agrees, but presses on to finish the argument. As he begins a discussion of the five possible regimes, however, Adeimantus jumps into the conversation.
Adeimantus challenges Socrates on the seemingly ludicrous impossibility of the best regime, in particular on the community of women and children. Socrates replied that he avoided it through fear of erring and dragging his friends down with him in his fall from truth. After some urging, he agrees to go on, and begins a comparison of the natures of men and women. Female hounds and male hounds make equally good guard dogs, and must receive the same education. So too must men and women receive the same education if they will given the same tasks. A man and a woman both suited for a particular craft, says Socrates, have the same nature, though different bodies, in the same way as two men do, though one may be bald and the other hairy. Likewise those have different natures that are fit for different tasks, as in the example of the man who is a doctor and the man who is a carpenter. Thus any woman fit for guarding must be given the same education in music and gymnastic, as fitting to her nature. Adeimantus assents, and Socrates, having escaped being swept away by the first wave, swims gamely on into the second.
Socrates describes the community of women and children as ideal because it unifies the guardian classes. The greatest evil for a city is faction and disunion, the cause of which is an overzealous love of one's own. The greatest good for the city (being opposite) is “what[ever] binds it together and makes it one” which is “the community of pleasure and pain...when to the greatest extent possible all the citizens alike rejoice and are pained at the same [things].” The best regime does not attempt to control the effects of faction, but rather to eliminate its causes. The community of women and children creates a single shared family just as the noble lie creates a single shared opinion as to who should rule. The best city is governed “most like a single human being...that community tying the body together with the soul in a single arrangement under the ruler within it.”
The second wave escaped, Glaucon asks Socrates whether it is truly possible for the best regime, thus far founded in speech, to come about in practice. Socrates answers that this is the third wave, and the most difficult. “Unless,” he says, “political power and philosophy coincide in the same place... there is no rest from ills... nor will the regime we have now described in speech ever come forth from nature, insofar as possible, and see the light of the sun [sic].”
What follows is an account of the philosopher. He must seek and obtain knowledge, which depends on what is, rather than opinion, which depends on what is becoming (or ignorance, which depends on what is not). The philosopher is able to catch sight of both what is real and what participates in it, understanding fair things but also the fair itself. They love the knowledge of what is, of things unchanging. Like a true pilot on a mutinous ship where each man seeks to seize the rudder for himself, it would be exceedingly strange for a philosopher to be honored, and this is part of the difficulty of the third wave—persuading men to follow a philosopher is extremely difficult.
Equally difficult is finding a true philosopher in the first place. The nature is extremely rare, exceptionally bad when giving a bad upbringing and if by the intervention of a god he grows well in an imperfect regime he is unlikely to seek power, but rather to content himself with quietly practicing justice and contemplation. Thus, says Socrates, “neither city nor regime will become perfect, nor yet will a man become perfect... before some necessity chances to constrain those few philosophers who aren't vicious... to take charge of a city, whether they want to or not, and the city to obey.” He denies that this is impossible, though very hard. It would require that the philosophers wipe clean the slate of a city and remake it.
Socrates then picks up the subject of the rulers and their nature. They must be proven lovers of the city, he says, and what's more they must be philosophers. Such gifted men must be quick, and not carried away, steady but not unmoved by teaching. His education must culminate in the study of the greatest thing, the idea of the Good itself. The Good can perhaps be understood by its offspring, the sun. “As the good is in the intelligible realm, with respect to intelligence and what is intellected, so the sun is in the visible region with respect to sight and what is seen.” The sun gives life and light to the visible world—without it men not only would have no sight, but no life. Similarly the idea of the Good itself not only illumines the world of intellect, but sustains it in existence and by the intelligible and unchanging realities of the forms, the visible and changing material world as well. The idea of the Good, however, is itself greater in dignity and beauty than the knowledge, truth and reality it provides and sustains. Socrates further explains what the philosopher must know in the analogy of the divided line.
The lower half the line, representing the visible realm, is divided itself in two. At the bottom are images and shadows and appearances, which correspond to the powers of imagination, and above them are the things in the visible world, such as trees and animals, which correspond to the power of trust or belief. The “ruler” of the visible world is the sun, by which all the things in it have their life and are perceived. Above the sun, the upper half the line is also divided. Its lower portion is filled with hypotheses and mathematics, which, like the images in the visible world, attempt to represent the forms and realities themselves in the upper half. A mathematician's theorem's about a perfect square are in the lower half, which corresponds to thought; the square itself is placed with the just itself, and the beautiful and all other forms, in the top portion of the line, which is the section of things contemplated or intelligible. Above the line entirely is the idea of the Good itself, which is the ultimate end of all knowledge. The higher the position of a thing on the line, the greater its participation in truth and in clarity.
Socrates follows the divided line with the allegory of the cave, in which men are held prisoner in a cave, with their eyes fixed forward on a wall, upon which they see shadows. These shadows are cast by puppets and statues held before a fire high behind them, but because the men cannot look at anything but the shadows on the wall, they assume them to be reality. A man released from his bonds and made to look at the light would be uncomfortable and pained, and would have difficulty believing that what he thought real was merely a collection of images. Dragged screaming to the surface, his disorientation would increase, but with time and training, he would be able to look first on the shadows of trees, then on the trees and things on the surface themselves, then at the stars and finally at the sun itself. He would conclude the sun to be the illuminating sustainer and source of all things, and would desire nothing more than to contemplate it for all his days. But if he were forced to return to the cave, and his vision dimmed because of the sudden darkness, he would be mocked and disbelieved about both the things in the cave and on the surface. The cave corresponds to the visible realm and its fire to the sun. The prisoner's journey is that of the soul turning towards the intelligible realms until at last, with utmost difficulty, it sees the idea of the Good, “[concluding] that this is in fact the cause of all that is right and fair in everything...and that the man who is going to act prudently in private or in public must see it.”
The education of the philosopher, therefore, is the art of turning the soul around to face reality. To this end, he is trained in things which “summon the intellect,” beginning with mathematics, progressing through geometry, astronomy, harmony and finally to dialectic, which is the art that releases a man from his bonds in the cave and leads him up to the intelligible world. It is because of this knowledge, this having seen the Good itself, that the philosopher ought to rule and does not want to. He would prefer nothing but to contemplate it, but for the sake of the city and its happiness, not his own, he must be forced back down into the cave, the city telling him that he has been born to rule and must go down into the cave, where he will perceive the phantoms each for what it is, because of his having seen the truth about the fair, the just and the Good. Thus the city will be governed well.
Education is the most important institution in the best regime, then, not because it produces warriors, though the warrior education is vital, but because it produces philosopher-kings. It is so powerful and vital that all but the philosophers must be kept from dialectic, and even those must only be exposed to it at the proper age, because the young tend either to abuse or be shaken by dialectic when they come upon it too early. From age thirty to thirty-five the philosophers study dialectic, after which they spend fifteen years in war and public office. At fifty years of age, the philosopher-kings are allowed to spend most of their time contemplating, with the remainder spent teaching their replacements before they are allowed to totter off to the Blessed Isles.
After setting down the aim and education of the philosophers, Socrates is at last able to address the question of the best way of life. At the end of his analysis of the cycle of regimes, he comes to the examination of tyranny, the most unjust of regimes. Given power by the people on the promise of fulfilling their desires, he rises to defend them against the wealthy, and promises to forgive debts and distribute land, while making cases against the wealthy. Tyrants then, having secured their immediate power, seem always two pursue two courses: the first, to start a war to maintain the people's dependence on himself, and second, to do away with all those able to threaten or criticize his power, including “some of those who helped in setting him up and are in power.” And so tyrants, says Socrates, always purge a city of the best men in it, and bring in foreigners and mercenaries. He despoils those with wealth or power and takes it for himself, even that of his own father, becoming, like Zeus, a friendless paranoid parricide.
Book IX is Socrates' answer to the questions of Glaucon. The tyrant is shown to be a slave to his own desires, shameless and unjust in his pursuit of them, and unable to fulfill them. Men correspond to cities, and the tyrant is, like his city, crushed beneath the weight of the smallest and worst part inside him, his soul “filled with much slavery and illiberality, and [furthermore] those parts of it that are most decent [are] slaves while a small part, the most depraved and maddest, [is] master.” So the tyrant's soul, as a whole, is least able to do what it wants, but is “full of confusion and regret,” driven about by its master desire, “always poverty-ridden and insatiable... full of fear.” He cannot be satisfied, and is a slave to his fears and appetites. Compared with the joy found by the philosopher-king in contemplation of the good, he seems the most wretched of men. But Socrates is yet unfinished.
There are three kinds of pleasure, according to the parts of the soul, but only the lover of wisdom learns truth, and so only he is capable of saying which type of pleasure, or way of life is in reality best, and he names his own. Having shown justice superior to injustice a second time, he adduces a third proof: the just man, loving wisdom over honor or gain, gains knowledge of what is, and lives a fuller and richer life than the lover of honor or of gain (both of whom are unjust, having an improperly ordered soul). Justice proving superior to injustice a third time, Socrates declares that the just man's happiness can be measured against the misery of the tyrant. The tyrant is third from the oligarch in his happiness (inclusive) who in turn is third from the king. Three by three is nine, and this raised to the third power for the three triumphs of justice over injustice yields the result, Socrates says, that the king “lives 729 times more pleasantly” than the tyrant.
With the nature of justice revealed as each minding his own business according to nature, and justice proved stronger than injustice, Socrates turns to his last task: defending justice against injustice in spite of an opposite reputation. To answer this, he conjures the image of a beast of many heads (the desires), a lion (the spirited part of the soul) and a man (the reason) joined together. This combination is then made to take the shape of a human being, who will be either just or unjust, without regard to reputation. To be unjust, says Socrates, is to feed the beast and the lion, and to have the man himself dragged around at their whim. The man who does justice, however, makes the man strong to tame the heads of the beast and subdue them when necessary by means of the lion, his natural ally, so that all three may live in union together, rather than disunion.
The argument is explained simply: by doing injustice, a man “enslaves the best part of himself to the most depraved.... the most divine part of himself to the most godless and polluted part.” It profits a man nothing to get away with injustice, because it disfigures his soul. A wise man will constantly guard the regime within him to keep it rightly ordered, just as a wise man will keep his body rightly ordered. Glaucon realizes that such a man may abstain from political things, save in the best regime, and still maintain his justice. Socrates tempers this. “In heaven,” he says, “perhaps a pattern is laid up for the man who wants to see and found a city within himself on the basis of what he sees. It doesn't make any difference whether it is or will be somewhere. For he would mind the things of this city alone and of no other.” Justice, thus understood, is not simply mightier than injustice, but it is the nature of man himself. Man, to be man and not a beast, must be ordered justly, with the head ruling the belly through the chest.
