17 The Republic

The Republic presents its own problems as a dramatic work. It is very long and there is not a lot of explosive action—especially after Book 1. Yet there is a drama to the work that arises from the disparity between what Plato seems to say and what he does and from the stark distastefulness of many of the ideas. The disparity is most clear in Book 10, when all imitative poets are banned from the philosophic state because they portray imitations of imitations. Yet what Plato himself does is present an imitation—a portrayal of Socrates talking to several young men. What can have been Plato’s purpose in condemning and banning works of imitative fiction while at the same time producing one?

It cannot be said in his defense that he had no alternative, that he needed to commit his words to writing a dialogue and thus to expose himself to the charge of violating his views. He could, if he had wanted, have chosen a prose medium that would not have called into question his own imitative work. Instead, he does unmistakenly and loudly call the discrepancy into question, and no reader or audience could fail to observe it. So there must be a meaning in the disparity, and, I think, the meaning is a clue to how we should interpret this and perhaps all the dialogues.

What Plato is saying is that the conversation in the Republic, itself an imitation, is not to be taken as a true reflection of the idea of justice or of an ideal philosophic state.^[1] The imitative discussion is to be rejected in favor of a real discussion. Plato is telling his audience, “Don’t read a conversation about justice; participate in one yourself. Enroll in my Academy.” In other words, the apparent inconsistency between the context of the Republic and the medium of the Republic challenges us to engage in active philosophy ourselves.^[2] This challenge applies to all the dialogues: don’t read conversations about piety or knowledge or friendship—this is not philosophizing. Philosophy is an active search for truth.

Many have assumed one of the challenges of the dialogue to be finding the correct allegorical interpretation. From the very first word (“I went down”)—taken as indicating a descent to the underworld­ until the concluding myth with its vision of the underworld-the text has been subjected to elaborate allegorizing.^[3] Such should not perhaps be surprising in a work that abounds in myths, metaphors, analogies, and plays on words. But, I think, a dramatic reading of the dialogue should eschew such allegorizing. The Stoics made Homer acceptable to themselves by allegorizing him; many of Plato’s critics have done the same to Plato. But I doubt that Plato would have meant his original audience to do so at the readings, nor is it necessary to do so to derive an important message from the work. At the other extreme, the work should not be read as Averroes read it, as a purely scientific treatise. To do so is to ignore what Plato wrote.^[4]

After a vigorous and exciting opening scene with Thrasymachus, the play settles down into a long and dramatically uneventful discussion with two young men—Plato’s brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus. At first, however, Book 2 opens quite energetically, as they ask Socrates for a really satisfactory explanation of why justice is advantageous in itself, why it is its own reward. Though Thrasymachus had apparently been tamed in his debate with Socrates, the two brothers are  uncon­vinced of the solidity of the conclusions. So, though indicating that their hearts are not in the argument that they present for injustice, they nevertheless present strong cases, their purpose to elicit the strongest possible defense of justice.

Socrates, who elsewhere in the dialogues has argued that one should put forth only arguments that one really believes (Gorgias 457D), allows the boys to present sham arguments, just as later he makes only a show of getting them to work out the argument and then happily lays it out for them (in seeming violation of the claim in the Theaetetus to be a midwife for the ideas of others). After initial arguments on behalf of injustice, the brothers assent to virtually everything Socrates says, even when what he says ought to stir questions, if not outright rejection. In a few cases, when the interlocutors have agreed with Socrates, Socrates disagrees with both himself and them, almost in a parody of the constant, constant affirmations. The drama arises from the frequently outrageous claims made, from the desire of the audience to interrupt the frozen, dead text in order somehow to animate it, to reject a conclusion that the mechanical interlocutors have accepted. The audience feels like caged dogs that have looked through the bars at a prey but are kept from it for an inordinate amount of time; the audience wants to break loose from the reading to debate actively the various proposals and claims.

This desire on the part of the audience begins immediately after the dialogue opens in Book I. Socrates abruptly and, it appears, capri­ciously seizes upon one of Cephalus’s points, about paying back what has been received, and makes it the focus of conversation with Ce­phalus’ s son Polemarchus. Socrates’ argument is equivocal in numer­ous points, as when he concludes that the just man has no use or that the just guard is also the most skillful thief.^[5] It is no wonder that Thrasymachus wishes to interrupt Socrates to set him straight. We too recognize that the argument is not quite square. And though Thrasy­machus does a terrible job of refuting Socrates and is himself refuted in the space of one Stephanus page, we the audience know that we could have done better. We might wish to challenge other of Socrates’ claims and ask, “Does a shepherd really not do his job for an income? Is it true that no one willingly rules? What does it mean to speak of a wage-earner’s art: is there any such thing?” At the end of Book 1, Socrates rejects the conversation with the now tamed Thrasymachus as having revealed nothing at all, for, he says, they have not worked out a definition of justice. If nothing has been learned, has Thrasymachus been shamed and tamed for nothing?

Glaucon and Adeimantus, having in Book 2 presented their case for injustice, agree to look for justice in its greater extent, in a city, and later to look for it in an individual (369A). The validity of the claim that we can find the origin of justice in the origin of a city is not closely examined. In any case, Socrates describes his model city (372A) as having very little in the way of softness or wealth; in conformity with Greek practice the level of comfort is described in terms of what is eaten^[6]—and what the people in the model city eat is modest: their desserts include chick-peas and beans. The people live with what they have, avoid poverty and war, pray to the gods, and enjoy friendship with one another.

Glaucon, calling the good city a “city of pigs,” wants a city with luxuries, not one in which there are just the bare essentials for life. We the audience cannot help agreeing with Glaucon, for we too would like some luxuries, if only tables to eat off of and beds to sleep on. It would appear that the entire city of words that Socrates builds in response to Glaucon over the next many books is far from the ideal, modest city he has recommended.^[7] First, in order to accommodate the desire for luxuries, Socrates swells the city to include soldiers (for we shall want our neighbors’ lands), whose qualities are like those of dogs, gentle­ ness and high-spiritedness together. Socrates, swept up by his analogy, cannot resist joking (376A-B): like dogs, soldiers must have a love of wisdom. How do dogs have a love of wisdom? They fawn on acquain­tances and are angry with strangers. Therefore, says Socrates, how could we deny love of learning to a creature whose criteria of the friendly and unfriendly are intelligence (knowing the person) and ignorance (not knowing the person)? How does Socrates’ interlocutor Glaucon respond to this silliness: with a “most assuredly.” Doesn’t even the most moderate member of Plato’s audience want to go up to Glaucon and, shaking him, scold, “Are you going to go along with everything Socrates says?”^[8]

There appears also in Book 2 one of those strange, dramatically contradictory episodes that recur periodically throughout the Repub­lic. After attacking (377) the lies told by Homer and Hesiod, Socrates is willing to allow them to be told, if told they must be, to very few and only after the sacrifice of an impossible-to-find animal (378A). Instead of teaching that the gods make war, he says, we ought to teach that citizens never quarrel with one another and that the very idea of quarrelling is impiety (378C). Finally, if we tell tales like that of Niobe (380A), we must devise interpretations so that it appears that what the gods did was good. Plato’s audience will no doubt want to challenge the text: after all, if some lies are good and some are bad, the arbiter of their goodness or badness cannot be truth. Perhaps Socrates is suggesting that in any but the healthy city (the “city of pigs” rejected by Glaucon) there can be no reliance or ultimate appeal to truth. All cities are flawed and, as a result, compromises need to be made.^[9] The text invites these questions, but we do not see Glaucon and Adeiman­tus asking them. After their initial energy, we see them lapse into a vacant, mechanical, monotonous affirmation.

Book 3 continues to challenge by its promulgation of things negative. Now Socrates wants to reject Homer’s poetry because it makes people lament too much (388D) and because it shows drunken lives devoid of self-control (389E); the guardians should not participate in comedy and tragedy lest they acquire a second nature by the continual imitation (395C). Finally, Socrates gets his interlocutors to agree that monoto­nous rhythms and boring storytelling should be allowed, but the varied, exciting kind disallowed. In effect, Socrates has, by the slow degrees of his splendid tour de force, transformed—as far as literature is concerned-his luxurious city into the “city of pigs.” His interlocutors do not object as little by little the two cities grow identical. Music too must contain rhythms that reflect the images of sobriety and courage (402C). How rhythms might do this remains a mystery-as much to Plato’s original audience, I suspect, as to us.^[10]

Health undergoes a similar straightening, as only simple, tasteless food is deemed suitable (405A). Doctors and judges have a peculiar nature: doctors should be sickly (so they will know illness firsthand [408D]) and judges should be chosen from those who had been simple­ minded and easily deceived in their youth. Sickly doctors, naive judges, tasteless food, boring literature? Don’t all of these render the luxurious city unluxurious? Has Socrates, in order to save the luxurious city, destroyed it?^[11] As we see this comic reversal, won’t we be tempted to interrupt, to point out the unfulfilled promise of making a Luxurious state, and, unlike Socrates’ present interlocutors, to challenge what is being said, or at least to laugh along with Socrates? To be sure, a bit later (420), Adeimantus laments that Socrates’ description does not conduce to the happiness of rulers, but, the philosopher responds, we must look to the good of the whole, not to the good of any group. (Adeimantus will overcome his materialistic view of happiness later and agree that the rulers are happy [465-66].)

Socrates slips in additional highly provocative statements as the discussion continues, and these too go for the most part unchallenged. For example, arguing that proper education is sufficient to give both cities and individuals their requisite unity (423E), Socrates adds in passing that a sufficient education will show that wives and children should be held in common. The claim is not self-evident in the context, yet once again we are shown uninspired interlocutors (who don’t raise the issue for twenty-five Stephanus pages). Other slippery arguments also let us see these “lazy interlocutors.” The argument for the different parts of the soul depends on the soul’s not being able to wish for opposites with the same part. Thus if reason and appetite and anger differ from each other and indeed war with each other, there must be several different parts of the soul. Yet we could by this argument multiply the parts of the soul almost without limit. If we are torn between like and dislike for something, do we have a different part of the soul for each? What if our desire to eat chocolate is at war with our desire to eat vanilla—do we therefore have a distinct part of the soul for each flavor? Surely these incomplete arguments are not meant to be accepted without question.^[12]

To our surprise, in the middle of the discussion of the various parts of the soul, we find Polemarchus, whom we have nearly forgotten, and Adeimantus, who has shown little initiative, whispering to each other. They have been wondering what Socrates could have meant earlier when he spoke of wives and children in common. We might wonder whether they have been paying attention since then or whether this interesting Socratic claim has been preying on their minds. The subject matter of the dialogue does not require the discussion of wives and children to occur just here. The subject appears to be-in Plato’s thinking-the most memorable part of the dialogue. When, in the beginning of the Timaeus, the conversation of the Republic is referred to, it is to this subject of women and children. So perhaps the insertion of the discussion in the middle of the dialogue is intended to awaken us for the more sustained and somewhat less flamboyant parts of the dialogue that come after the fifth book.^[13] We are certainly startled when even Thrasymachus is again mentioned as urging Socrates to speak on about this exciting topic (450C). Reminded of Thrasyma­chus’s continued presence and uncharacteristic silence, we are to note how completely he has been tamed: even he raises no objection to the present conversation.

Socrates tries half-heartedly to avoid the discussion but yields to Glaucon’ s inspirational observation that such conversations are the whole life of reasonable men. Socrates is reluctant to speak because he will have to explore the matter tentatively as he goes along. Perhaps Plato is showing that a legitimate way to engage in philosophical discussion is by this sort of free-flowing speculation. Acquitted of accidental homicide ahead of time, that is, acquitted of damaging the truth, Socrates proceeds.

The discussion about women does not, however, immediately follow as promised. Instead of discussing common wives and children, Soc­ rates addresses their common education (552A-C). And here Socrates seems intentionally to titillate his interlocutors, saying that women should exercise naked with the men. Aware that such an activity would generate scurrilous jokes, Socrates uses language that suggests that he himself is making such a joke.^[14]

When the present interlocutors fail to question the assumptions of his claims, Socrates conjures up an imaginary interlocutor. Socrates has this imaginary person ask why, when he has argued that individuals ought to specialize according to their particular natures, he now assigns the same duties to men and women, whose natures differ (453A)? We ask why, when there is a roomful of conversationalists, does Plato the dramatist avoid using them and instead invent an imaginary questioner? Are Glaucon, Adeimantus, and Polemarchus not quick-witted enough to ask the imaginary interlocutor’s question? Why does Plato deliberately portray this group of young men as passive? Will his audience be provoked to ask its own questions?

Socrates wriggles out of his own objection by distinguishing essential and accidental differences and says that men and women are both capable of the particular duties he is discussing. Yet he repeats his belief that though men and women can do the same things, men can do them better (457).^[15] One is left to wonder why in an ideal state the inferior would ever be chosen over the superior. Why assert the ability of women to rule, only to undercut that ability? The inconclusive nature of the matter seems to invite the audience to discuss it.

When we recall again that the extended discussion of the state developed from Glaucon’s objection to the modest healthy state as a “city of pigs,” we can only gape at the litany of horrors that Socrates now conjures up for his luxurious city: wives and children will be in common, children are not to know their parents (457D); matings will be arranged, as in dog breeding (459); marriage will be by lottery (460A); women, their breasts engorged with milk, will be brought to the pens where the children are kept to feed them (460C); parentage will be established arbitrarily by a system of month-counting from marriage (461D). The women, like hounds, will go off to war with the men and they will do everything in common. All this is supposed to produce unity.

As a reward for excellence in war, good warriors should be allowed to kiss anyone.^[16] Here Glaucon becomes alive and suggests that it be legislated too that no one refuse to kiss such a warrior. Socrates adds that the accomplished warrior may marry more often and have more children than others (468A-B). That the youthful interlocutor Glaucon should become alive discussing sex illustrates the humorous nature of the passage. As long as they are freely speculating, what harm in adding features attractive to randy youth?

After some patriotic discussion about how it is unnatural for Greeks to fight Greeks, with whom they are akin, but natural to fight barbari­ans (470A)-perhaps a reference to the lsocratean plan on uniting Greeks against a foreign foe-the conversation turns to the feasibility of such a city.^[17] Socrates observes that words always fall short of describing reality (473), so that we must not expect the actual city to coincide exactly with the one that he has described. Perhaps the same could be said for the dialogue itself: its words fall short of describing the real philosophical experience. But of one thing Socrates is sure:

the good state will emerge only when political power is merged with a philosophical intellect.

The next book continues with the discussion of philosophers and the philosophical government.^[18] Those who are not philosophers are no different at all from the blind—an extreme statement that will either provoke Plato’s audience to think of themselves as philosophers or to reject the claim as rhetorical excess. We are stirred to seek a philosophical education by the argument concerning how the best natures suffer the most when they are deprived of their proper food: thus the best souls are worsened most by a bad education (491D-E). Only a good education will protect us from the “sophist of public opinion.” Yet even a good education, even that which we could no doubt receive in the Academy, may not be enough. And now Socrates injects one of the many notes of deep pessimism that we find in the Republic: if anything has ever turned out well in our current society, he says, we need to thank God for it; it surely cannot have arisen in our unphilosophical states. What can be the effect of so intense a condemnation of the present world? It would be to elicit in the audience a counter example-if even only one. At least once in human history someone has done something right. And no doubt each member of the audience would be thinking to himself: “I could do it! I could be a philosophical ruler who has his eye on the good and the true.” The effect of such pessimistic statements is, I think, to provoke such a reaction. Indeed there is probably no one outside of the dialogue’s interlocutors, that is to say, no real reader of the dialogue or member of Plato’s audience, who would swallow Socrates’ long speech without numerous objec­tions and modifications. What is magnificent in the dialogue is the splendor of its philosophical aspirations, its continuous perseverance in aiming at the good of the soul.

When a moment later (496B) Socrates explains why neither he nor any other promising philosophical spirit has entered politics, the ex­cuses ring hollow: Socrates’ secret voice, Theages’ sickly frame, someone else’s unimportant and uninteresting locale. Wouldn’t a mem­ber of the audience believe such excuses not overwhelmingly difficult to overcome? The peculiar pessimism crops up again when Socrates claims that no state will ever be perfected until chance makes a philosopher the ruler or until divine inspiration seizes the sons of those who rule now (499C). If, like the other dialogues, the Republic is aimed at persuading the sons of Greece’s leaders to enroll in the Academy, such comments are likely aimed at them: they will be thinking them­ selves just the sort of persons who could bring about a philosophical polity. Such an audience would seem even more in mind when Socrates asserts forthrightly the possibility that the son of a king will have a philosophical nature. We might join those who wonder whether this passage is aimed at Dionysius, in whom Plato had high hopes when he went to Syracuse.^[19]

The discussion of the philosopher-ruler leads into the subject of the goal of philosophical endeavor—the idea of the good. Adeimantus directly asks Socrates the nature of the good (506A). Socrates, reluc­tant to say what he thinks, wonders why Adeimantus should care about the opinions of another. Socrates has not before in the dialogue been hesitant to share his views, so it is strange to see the hesitancy now. But it does not last long. When Glaucon adds his behest, Socrates begins. The earnestness of the request to Socrates, along with the talk about the importance and climactic nature of the topic, is dramatically effective in arousing the audience’s interest. Talk about the next topic is a dramatist’s technique for riveting attention.

It turns out, however, that Socrates will not discuss the good itself, but the “offspring of the good,” and we have another of those in­ stances of stepping back that recur throughout the dialogues.^[20] One might wonder whether the purpose is to make evident the distance between a real discussion among living interlocutors in a living philosophical argument and that which we get in a written dialogue. If, as Plato himself suggests in the Seventh Letter, one can get a glimpse of the truth only after a prolonged study, perhaps in a dialogue he is willing to give only a glimpse of the “offspring” of an idea. Reading a dialogue, even a great one, can never be a substitute for the activity of the Academy.

The central part of the Republic contains a number of elaborate extended analogies—the philosopher-helmsman, who is not respected by mutinous sailors (488A-489A); sunlight as the parent of vision (507- 508); the divided line (509); and the man who leaves the cave to see the unshadowed truth of things. These analogies have been the subject of numerous differing interpretations, some quite as elaborate or even more elaborate than the analogies themselves.^[21] Like memorable arias of opera, they have become so famous as to have a life virtually apart from their contexts. Yet the purpose of the analogies is clear enough: to draw a contrast between the philosopher who aims at the bright, divine light of truth and the wild and disorderly rabble, who are difficult or impossible to guide intelligently. The analogies are powerful meta­phors whose effect is on the emotions of the audience.^[22] They stir each member of the audience to think himself that candid and unshakable helmsman, that resolute and courageous spirit returning to the cave to enlighten his fellows, even at the risk of death. The effect is poetic; the effect is dramatic.

That there is an art of inspiring souls is brought out clearly in the Republic. Immediately after the metaphor of the cave, Socrates dis­ cusses the art of getting souls “to turn voluntarily towards the light” (518C-D), to convert to philosophy. Is not the dialogue form itself­ with its rich analogies and metaphors, with its infectious enthusiasm for philosophy-the means for effecting this conversion?

The discussion of the course of studies for our guardians contains the usual dose of playful seriousness and turns our thoughts to curricular matters. Subjects ought to be both useful and philosophically uplifting. Mathematics, for example, is not only abstract, Socrates argues, but useful: soldiers like Agamemnon need to be able to count their troops (522D). The disproportion between the lofty abstract purpose and the trivially practical purpose is comical. When Glaucon points out the practical value for war of geometry (526C-D), Socrates turns his attention to its value in training the mind abstractly. Glaucon most promisingly offers astronomy as the next subject, for it is useful to both farmer and soldier for the knowledge it gives of the seasons (527). But Socrates soundly rebukes Glaucon for suggesting a subject because of its utility. After a brief discussion of the virtues of solid geometry, Glaucon once again proposes astronomy, now offering the kind of punning justification we might expect from Socrates: it turns our minds towards higher things (529). And it startles when Socrates again rejects the justification. He objects that astronomy makes us look down, not up, for it makes us think of physical, not non-physical things, of things visible instead of invisible.

Glaucon seems to take the rebuke to heart, for when Socrates asks what should be studied next, Glaucon is sullenly silent. And after Socrates has explained that the next subject, harmonics, could provide patterns for the ears as astronomy has provided them for the eyes, the young man quails at the immensity of the task of organizing and correlating all these studies. Socrates then stirs Glaucon by a praise of dialectic, a subject mathematicians are not very adept in, and by an echo of the metaphor of the cave, the promise that all these studies will lead the soul to the light (532C).

Now when Glaucon asks Socrates about dialectic (533A), Socrates tells Glaucon that he will not be able to understand the explanation without having had all the preliminary studies. Here the drama fades as the interlocutors mechanically agree to their inability to understand—not the slightest protest issues from their lips—and as the philosopher waxes eloquent about the glorious nature of dialectic, whose approach to truth is like that described in the metaphor of the cave. After running through the collection of qualities that one should already have before undertaking to study dialectic—a noble and gen­erous temper, intellectual acuity, an energetic disposition, a good memory, industriousness, a love of truth, and all the moral virtues— Socrates reminds us that he is engaging in play (536B). Perhaps a mollifying statement is necessary here since even the most capable of the dialogue’s audience will realize a probable deficiency in at least one of the qualities named. If only perfect students might enroll in the Academy, the class size would be rather small. On the other hand, an invitation to apply would be most flattering!

The eighth book of the Republic perhaps shows better than any of the other books the mingling of play with serious purpose. After a quick review of the strange conclusions on the equality of women and the lack of private wealth by rulers, Socrates goes through the various correspondences of character and constitution and explains how they degenerate into progressively worse characters and constitutions. It must be rather disappointing to learn that even the best constitution, though the most resistant to corruption, can still be corrupted (545D). And some playful complicated nonsense (546B) having to do with calculating the proper season for mating makes it highly likely that errors are going to be made and degenerate children born. Just in case we were thinking Plato a real proponent of woman’s equality, he has the degeneracy begin when a nagging wife of a guardian complains to her son that her guardian-husband isn’t sufficiently rich (549). A steady decline to the timocratic, oligarchic, democratic, and tyrannical dis­positions ensues, described with that same tone of mechanical inevita­bility that one finds in texts on child development. Perhaps reacting to his own society, Plato has given Socrates some especially funny comments about democracy (562-63): all sense of hierarchy vanishes as women become equal to men and as anarchy enters even animals— dogs and horses go and do as they wish. In response, a tyrant arises. Much of Book 9 deals with the nature of the tyrannical man, who is the absolutely most miserable of all mankind (except of course for the actual tyrant himself [578C]). Socrates reaches a comic height when he calculates that the royal philosopher is 729 times happier than the tyrant (587D). The incongruity of so exact a quantification of some­ thing so unquantifiable as happiness is the kind of parody of scientific exactitude we find in the Timaeus.^[23]

The last book of the Republic contains the two puzzles that are solved by a dramatic analysis: (I) why Plato rejects imitative art when engaging in it himself;^[24] and (2) why in the story of Er there is so pessimistic a description of the fate of the good souls that when they must choose their new lives, the very first soul, the one who in a former existence had been very good, grabs the life of tyrant.^[25] I think both these puzzles have been dealt with in this chapter, and the solutions are complementary. We are to see Plato challenging us. In attacking mimetic art, he is calling into question the authority of his own work. The dialogue, he tells us, is mimetic philosophy, not real philosophy. And when he shows the best soul of an earlier life eager to be the most miserable in the next life he is stirring us to do better, to strive to be the one who resists the false luster of the tyrant’s gold for the true shine of the just philosopher.

So the Republic as drama is propaideutic and protreptic. It achieves its effects not by stirring us to diagram the divided line and to calculate its mathematical ratios, but by arousing in us the desire to be a student of philosophy and to aim at truth. Like all great works of art, its effect is on our emotions. That the work invites us to study it as a text and as a monument of ancient philosophy is, I think, an unintended effect of its literary qualities. It is hard for us to believe that a work that talks so much about philosophy could be written not to give definitive answers but to inspire us to seek them ourselves. Inspiration, however, is a difficult end to achieve, and it is no small end. If you inspire people to be good, and taking up philosophy is certainly to be good, then you have achieved a goal perhaps greater than telling them about the good. Plato succeeds brilliantly. Let us award him the prize for drama.