If a large random group of people were asked to name an important work of philosophy, the answer given most often would probably be Plato’s Republic. Why it merits such distinction is something fewer people might venture to say. Those whose acquaintance with the book is primarily second-hand, guided by a lecturer or by books about it, could be excused for being puzzled about its enduring power. It is said to be a portrait of an “ideal state,” but one that no actual government has ever tried to put into practice, and it is said to contain a statement of a famous philosophic “theory,” but one it would be hard to find anyone who believed in. What, then, makes it more than a strange relic of obsolete thinking? The answer is easily found by anyone who ignores the masses of learned explanations that surround the Republic, and simply plunges into reading it. There has rarely been a book that so successfully grabs a reader and stirs spirited responses.
A number of philosophers over the centuries have written dialogues. That means, in most cases, that they have written arguments and counterarguments, and put them in the mouths of imaginary speakers. Plato went about it the opposite way. He wrote imagined conversations among people whom, for the most part, he knew, and made those conversations rise to the level of philosophic discussion. Plato did not treat philosophy as something that could be delivered or presented or even imitated in a written work. He knew that there is no way to encounter philosophy except from the inside, and he wrote with the purpose of stimulating, provoking, and inspiring the experience of it. He himself had been strongly affected by listening to the conversations Socrates used to have in public, and he made Socrates the primary speaker in most of his dialogues. Even in those dialogues in which Socrates is not present, or says little, a Platonic dialogue is always an imitation of Socrates. Plato made the things he wrote as substitute encounters with Socrates: not depictions of such encounters for us to watch, but evocations of them for us to experience. So great can be the power of imitative fiction that Plato successfully sets in motion philosophic activity every time a reader gives him the slightest chance.
A chance to respond to Plato’s imitation of Socrates does not depend on being favorably disposed to their words in advance, or even on approaching the dialogues with an open mind. Since the dialogues teach no doctrine, an antagonistic response is as effective as any other kind in making a reader a more active thinker. Within the Republic, Socrates is challenged in Book I by a hostile and angry opponent, and then again in Book II by two friendly but determined young men who think he hasn’t given that opponent anything like an adequate answer. All three, and a few other characters who get hooked along the way, have one thing in common: they all put aside everything else they intended to do for many hours, and become absorbed in a conversation about philosophic topics and about philosophy itself. The only person present who is immune to it all is a very old man, intent on preparations for his death. The rest of the characters in the dialogue are a lot like us, a diverse array of people who pick up the Republic, and for one reason or another can’t put it down.
The Republic depicts people with different interests and desires being brought together into a shared activity freely chosen by each; this is a reflection not only of our situation as readers of it, but also of its primary theme. The dramatic situation in a Platonic dialogue is never mere literary ornamentation for a set of arguments, but always in some way shows the reader the way to an answer to the question discussed in it. The question that sets in motion the whole discussion in the Republic is, what is justice? That question receives a succession of formal answers, but none of them reveals as much about what justice is as does the human interaction we witness. In the dialogue, one person pressures a second person into joining him and his friends to help them kill a little time, a third person leaves the gathering to pursue his own business, a fourth person tries to break up the discussion as soon as it begins to get somewhere, and a fifth and sixth person insist on imposing their concerns on the group, but with the adroit management of the situation by one of their number, they become a harmonious partnership in an extended activity that in some way satisfies them all. If we can say what makes the Republic possible as a living event, an understanding of what justice is cannot be far away.
The one adroit member of the group who manages to pull them all together is of course Socrates. The Republic is one of Plato’s longest dialogues, and it is in some ways all Socrates. Every word of it is given to us through Socrates’ narration, and no other dialogue is so packed with his opinions, his imagination, and his ways of looking at things. At the same time, though, no dialogue so emphatically presents a partnership in learning. Most dialogues of Plato resemble one or more aspects of Book I of the Republic, in which someone is brought to realize he understands less than he thought he did, someone else is provoked to anger, a few others begin to be curious, and the end comes with a question sharpened and unresolved. In the Republic, we are given three more books in which a couple of intelligent listeners initiate a dialogue about the original dialogue, and then six more books in which all those still present commit themselves to remain involved, and state a consensus about how the discussion should proceed. The beginning of Book V is presented as something like a constitutional convention in which those assembled unanimously and explicitly associate themselves into a community and choose a leader. So the Republic is simultaneously an extended portrait of Socrates and a concentrated representation of all humankind.
The political community referred to in the dialogue’s traditional title is most explicitly the imagined city discussed at length in it, designed to make justice evident, but that title takes on additional meaning when one sees that it applies also to the group of people assembled for the discussion. Each of those communities is a willing combination of ruler and ruled, brought together not by force or by practical necessity but for the sake of improving the lives of all concerned. But one of the most striking facts about the city is the presence in it of an ambiguous class of people who are somehow both rulers and ruled, and somehow neither. The guardians of the city are the middle part that makes the whole partnership possible. They display neither the private desires and interests of the population at large, nor the ultimate directing judgment that rules the city. They willingly sacrifice the former and acquiesce in the latter because they find the fulfillment of their spirited natures in holding together a healthy community. Like the city, the assembled group in the Republic has a middle part that makes it possible for it to be more than a two-way encounter between Socrates and others, a mere Book I, and to become a stable whole. That middle part consists of the two young men, Glaucon and Adeimantus, who happen to be brothers of Plato.
Glaucon and Adeimantus show in Book II of the dialogue that they are capable thinkers and self-starters. Both are marvelously articulate, and each has already thought through questions about justice and injustice that go far beyond most people’s unreflective opinions. But each is aware of his own inability to resolve the questions that seem to him to be most in need of resolution. They see the need for some trustworthy clarification of the goals of human life, but they have sufficient respect for their own powers of judgment to know that none of the things they’ve ever heard argued or praised, by parents, poets, politicians, or philosophers, gives them a satisfactory account of what makes life good. Between them they provide a critique of Socrates’ arguments in Book I, and between them they sustain the lengthy discussion with him that their critique demands. They recognize the need for Socrates’ leadership, and they supply the energy and effort to make that leadership effective for their friends as well. They are the middle part of the partnership that lets it be one and not many.
This threefold structure of ruling and ruled parts, bound into unity by a middle part, is the dominant image of the Republic. It is present not only in the large community discussed and the small community that discusses it, but ultimately in another community that makes up each one of us. The dialogue discusses political topics, but all for the sake of seeing more clearly the interior composition of a single human being. The political themes of the dialogue have their purpose in an analogy to the human soul that finds in it the original three-part structure that is the source of all the rest. We may be accustomed to think of ourselves as a combination of head and heart, or of reason and desire. But how could a twofold entity become one human being? One part could overpower the other or even destroy it, or each could sometimes win and sometimes lose in an ongoing power struggle. The Republic presents the possibility that the many conflicting aims and desires within us can compose their differences in the same way a community of people can, because there is a middle part in us capable of playing the unifying role.
The three-part soul, in which spiritedness permits reason to rule, and not squelch, desire, makes possible a life in which everything in us can be in harmony and can fulfill its cravings without depriving any of the other parts of satisfaction. This arrangement is the basis of the answer Socrates finds in the Republic to the question of what justice is, and the result it can produce is what he calls happiness. As an outline sketch, this proposal may be more useful than anything comparable to it as an aid to thinking about the goals of human life. But it is not a theory. In the sketchy form in which I have stated it here, it is in fact just short of useless. It gains its utility when it is fleshed out by the living activity of a reader of the Republic, built into a whole by thinking and imagination, and given life by application to examples in and out of the dialogue. But a reader may be unwilling to try out such a way of looking at things, just because it speaks of us as having souls. This is not a popular way of thinking these days. A difficulty of this sort brings a reader to a crucial turning point. To suspend one’s own opinions for a while can open the door to philosophy; to balk at entering into thoughts that are not familiar and comfortable can make philosophy impossible.
As a reader nears that particular fork in the road, when the parts of the soul are being spoken of in Book IV, one thing he might happen to recall is a passage near the beginning of Book I (329B-D) in which the old man Cephalus reports on an unexpected benefit of old age. Once sexual and other desires have slackened, he had said, someone can finally be at peace, if he happens to have an orderly disposition. But what is it in him that is left at peace when the desires die down? What components go into an orderly disposition, and how are they disposed? If Cephalus is talking about an imaginable human experience, it might be convenient to think of it as reflecting the relation among the parts of someone’s soul. Whether “soul” is really the best word to use can be left as a topic for another day. A certain courtesy and civility toward others, the kind of attitude without which conversation is impossible, is sufficient to let us entertain the idea of a soul while Socrates and others speak of it, and a self-interested desire to understand something inherently interesting makes it worth a try. For a good and alert reader, one who thought in Book I that there was something wrong with the way Cephalus was thinking about his life, the idea of the three-part soul may already be paying off by suggesting that Cephalus himself was a spiritless man, a two-part soul. In his younger days, he was by his own report a slave of his desires. Having lived long enough for those desires to atrophy, he comes before us as a fragment of a human being, as though he were nothing but a head, which is what his name happens to mean.
This sort of word-play with someone’s name is something Plato is fond of, but it is of no importance. At best it adds a little confirmation to a connection or interpretation a reader has come up with on the basis of better evidence. What is more important is that there are no loose ends in a Platonic dialogue. If a character enters and leaves, whatever he had to say will be connected with themes that emerge in the main body of the discussion. Cephalus claims to enjoy philosophic conversation, but he has no time for it and no curiosity about it, and no spiritedness is aroused in him when his own opinions are shown to be inadequate. He lives outside the city of Athens, and places himself outside the community of learning that spontaneously forms in his own house. Something seems to have been lacking in his makeup or at least in his education. The idea of the three-part soul offers a chance to think more fully and deeply about him. A reader who avails himself of that chance is well launched on the road toward a more examined life, and the particular assumption that human beings have souls is not what matters most about that examination, nor even a part of it that can’t be discarded later if a reason to do so comes along. What that reader has done is not adopt a theory, but follow some distance along a dialectical path.
Now the three-part soul is not the only thing the Republic gives us to think about, and Cephalus is not the only example it gives us to apply that thought to, but the process that Socrates calls dialectic is the heart of everything that goes on in that or any other Platonic dialogue. Dialogue as a form of writing and dialectic as a way of thinking are, in Plato’s handling of them, inseparable. In this dialogue, dialectic becomes an explicit topic in Book VI, and large claims are made about it. What Socrates is talking about, though, has been in front of us all along, and he has even given a simple description of it in Book I. At 348A-B, he recommends a way of handling his disagreement with Thrasymachus. He says the two of them could take turns making speeches, each refuting the other point by point, and let the others serve as a jury to decide who got the better of whom in the argument. What he prefers, though, is that they start with something they agree about, and see how it bears on the question under discussion. In that way, he says, each of them would be a juror and an advocate at the same time. This reflects a preference for the attitude involved in discussion rather than debate, and the Greek word for dialectic is made out of the verb that means to engage in conversation. A debater treats the other speaker as someone who can only be right if he himself is wrong, whom he must defeat at all costs. In a conversation, though, we generally have the decency to accept the things another person says, at least temporarily and tentatively. If we disagree, and take the matter seriously, we might say “if that’s true, doesn’t such-and-such follow?” or “doesn’t that depend on assuming so-and-so?” At such a point dialectic has begun, and the give-and-take that ensues is nothing like the back-and-forth of a debate.
The difference is that the dialectical interchange is taking place within the thinking of each participant, as well as between them. By adopting the double role of judge and advocate at the same time, each of them detaches himself from his own opinions in order to examine them. But those opinions are not just propositions up for debate, but things one also sees good reason to believe. All our powers can be involved in dialectic; a spirited attachment to one’s own opinions can be opposed by a desire to understand things better, and some sort of insight into evidence must come into play to move things forward. If the discussion is pressed back through deeper and deeper assumptions, presuppositions one never knew one was relying on can come to sight. And if the inquiry doesn’t break off at that stage but continues, Socrates claims (533C-D), it becomes possible to discover the difference between opinion and knowledge, and to advance toward the latter. That discovery is also the beginning of philosophy, and it is what Socrates refers to at one important moment as a turning around of the whole soul (518C-D). This turning is said to be possible for someone who has emerged from a cave in which he, like all of us, has been imprisoned. The cave analogy is perhaps the best known passage in the Republic, and it bears more than one good interpretation. In one of them, emergence from the cave into the sunlight can represent the condition of someone who has not realized that all his thinking has relied on opinion, at the moment when he discovers by experience that knowledge is possible.
The dual perspective involved in dialectical thinking is a bringing together in one activity of the ways of seeing represented as in and out of the cave. This same duality is also at the heart of a characteristic way of speaking Socrates was famous for: his irony. Students beginning to read Plato often misinterpret this irony as sarcasm, but its purpose is never to belittle another person. Typically, it takes the form of a mock fear of his own ignorance and someone else’s wisdom. An instance of this at 336D-337A infuriates Thrasymachus. Protestations like those of Socrates, while some might find them annoying, can be insulting only to someone who refuses to acknowledge any ignorance of his own. Socratic irony can always be taken as an invitation to inquire. Someone who refuses that invitation may well be so locked into one way of looking at things that one could imagine his head as held rigidly in one position by shackles. In Plato’s Apology, his depiction of the speech Socrates gave when he was on trial for his life, Socrates describes his own condition by saying (22D) “I was aware that I know nothing.” The knowledge of ignorance is the theme of all Socratic irony. It became a common saying in the more paradoxical form reported by Diogenes Laertius in his Lives of the Philosophers (II, 32): “he used to say…that he knew nothing except just that (auto touto).” But Socrates had no interest in logical puzzles. The assertion that he knows that he does not know is Socrates’ provocative way of declaring a permanent commitment to philosophy, a willingness always to return to the moment of discovery when one first experiences the insight that opinion is not knowledge, and discerns that this insight is not just one more opinion.
The purpose of Socrates’ irony is never to mock someone while praising him in words, but to spark a response in which the listener cannot remain in a passive relation to his own opinions. If that listener is roused even to defend those opinions, or to figure out what’s wrong with Socrates’ formulation, he can become actively engaged in seeing evidence in a way that will stand before him as a contrast to his ordinary reliance on opinion. Knowing is understood by Socrates as the living activity of insight, for which the Greek word is noêsis. The cave analogy at the beginning of Book VII is the companion to a mathematical image at the end of Book VI that likens the powers of the soul to the segments of a line divided in a certain repeated ratio. The highest power is first called dialectic, then insight, and finally knowledge. Commentators will tell you that the divided line image presents “Plato’s theory of forms,” but the passage itself (510E-511A) introduces the notion of forms, the invisible looks of intelligible things seen directly in live thinking, as a criticism of the sort of thinking embodied in theories. A theory is unable to step off above its own assumptions. The divided line offers the possibility that we can and should strive to do just that, and that nothing less is genuinely philosophic. Socrates uses his irony to goad, and his images to beckon, others toward that highest thinking that leaves its familiar certainties behind and relies on nothing but the power it has in the moment of its exercise to assess truth.
In the image of the divided line, the power of knowing is a fourth proportional. If we are given the ratio of two magnitudes a:b and a third magnitude c, a fourth magnitude is there to be found if we make the effort. Socrates tells us that genuine knowing is related to the sort of understanding involved in theories as a visible tree is related to its reflection in a pond. The crucial component of this complex image is the power at the bottom of the line, the way of seeing by which we recognize an image as an image. If your back is to the tree, you can still tell that what you are looking at is its image, and imagine the tree itself. Similarly, the divided line suggests, there is an intellectual imagination that assures us there are intelligible things themselves that stand behind and above anything we may reason about on the basis of assumptions.
The divided line is an image about images, in the middle of a dialogue full of images. One of the things that most of all gives the Republic its characteristic flavor is its profusion of images of all kinds. At various points in the dialogue (such as 435D and 506E), Socrates emphasizes that a precise account of the things under discussion would have to go by a longer and harder road, but that a lot can still be gained by the use of images. In fact an image has the advantage over a theory in that one can more easily be reminded that it is not knowledge but only a dialectical step toward knowing. And Socrates repeatedly reminds Glaucon and Adeimantus, when they become too convinced of things they ought to be examining critically, not to be so sure that they’ve really found the best plan for education (416B-C), that the city they’ve designed is really the best (450C), or that the soul really has three parts (612A). One of the words used most frequently in the Republic is oiomai, translated here almost always as “I imagine” as another constant reminder that everything made intelligible in the dialogue is offered first to the imagination, and is thought through, and into, only by those willing to make their own efforts to ascend through the stages of the divided line.
The topic that occupies the largest part of the dialogue is the arrangement of laws and other provisions that would make the best political community. Whether Socrates is making serious practical proposals is much disputed by readers. Socrates himself at different times seems to argue both sides of that question (as at 450C, 540D, 592B), but one might have to distinguish features of the city that could and would improve political life from those meant only to be thought about. And at one point Socrates draws back from his own seriousness, calling the whole discussion playful (536C), but he goes on to argue that the best learning always begins as play, in which the learner’s own powers become spontaneously active. Practicality and seriousness may be best served by free-ranging discussion that places no possibilities off-limits. Readers who fiercely disagree about whether any sort of slavery is being condoned, or whether a general censorship is being imposed beyond the early education of one part of the population, may be doing exactly what Socrates hopes for, on matters that the text itself will not settle in any unambiguous way. But no matter what one makes of the political content of the dialogue, discussion of it is always serving another purpose, in which the design of the city is not the ultimate topic but an image of it. The organization of a city is introduced (368C-369A) as something to be looked at, for the sake of seeing more clearly how justice might be present in a single human being. The design of the city as the image of a soul may require assumptions unnecessary or inappropriate to a city considered on its own terms.
In particular, the governing principle for the city designed in the Republic is that it must have the greatest possible unity (423B, 462A-B). But Aristotle, discussing Socrates’ city in Book II, Chapter 2 of his Politics, argues that the unity appropriate to a city is not simply unity as such, and that too great a unity can destroy a city. This is often spoken of as a “refutation of Plato,” but anyone who has gotten the hang of the dialectical style of the dialogues can see that Aristotle may simply be following a path that Socrates has opened up. Socrates explicitly says in 462C that he is designing his city to be most like a single human being. This may have the double benefit of revealing in one image the multiplicity that needs to be harmonized in each of us and the limits to the possible unity in any association we might have with others. That is, the analogy is equally revealing both where it applies and where it breaks down. Socrates has given to our imaginations a city for us to see and think about, not to take literally as a political program. His imaginary city is on the borderline between the soul and political life, a vantage point from which we are invited to try to understand them both. We need to interpret the city ourselves, to make any such understanding our own, and we can try out interpreting it on various assumptions. The variety of interpretations, and any inherent difficulties in each of them, are discrepancies that call forth the activity of intellect and can disclose to us some of our own unexamined opinions. The dialectical motion that results is not merely a substitution of one opinion for another, but an advance to opinions that are more well-grounded in insight.
There are those who think the arguments Socrates makes in this or any dialogue can be detached from their contexts and refuted. Such readers fail to grasp the nature of dialectic not only as it animates the text but also as it enhances their own engagement with the text. They may think that philosophy is logical analysis. If they confine themselves to the third segment of the divided line, their disdain for the images in its lowest part denies them any chance to achieve the kind of seeing that belongs to its highest part. When people speak of arguments in Platonic dialogues as fallacious, they rarely allege any errors in reasoning. What they turn out to mean in virtually all cases is that there is some assumption governing the conclusion that is either untrue or unnecessary. Such an assumption may be an opinion of the person Socrates is talking to. The whole point of Socrates’ approach to discussion is to explore such assumptions by exposing them, tracing conclusions to which they lead, and following them back to higher assumptions. Sometimes assumptions are introduced by Socrates, not because he is unaware of them or endorsing them, but because they clarify connections and reveal choices that confront the other person. In all these cases it is the listener or reader who is invited to find the flaws or choose the way forward, but this is not a contest, a chess match in which someone is challenged to show how smart he is. The challenge is a much deeper one, in which logical moves play a role but are the least important of the things that are at stake. Socrates is always offering help, in the form of images, by means of which another person can begin to see more possibilities and open up his thinking. And for the reader, Plato too offers the image of the people engaged in the dialogue, and invites us to see something in what they are doing or failing to do that might let us advance beyond them.
A small example of the sort of thing Socrates does with images can be found at 375D-E. He and Glaucon appear to be at a loss to find a type of human character that is at once high-spirited and gentle, until Socrates suggests that they might find an image of it in dogs. By nature, dogs get angry at strangers but they treat people they know with affection. They must be lovers of learning, Socrates concludes, so maybe philosophically inclined human beings would be similarly spirited and gentle. Now as a piece of reasoning this is obvious nonsense, but true conclusions can follow from false premises, and in any case the ensuing discussion about how to educate people to be both spirited and gentle leaves aside both the analogy to dogs and anything purportedly derived from it. Why then does Socrates make this detour through an image that seems useless if not destructive to the argument? References to dogs crop up a number of times in the rest of the dialogue, and the memory of Socrates’ earlier abortive analogy may serve some purpose for a reader who found it puzzling or annoying at first. It seems to do just that for Glaucon at 440D, where Socrates praises him for getting hold of a conception in thought by taking to heart what was first in his imagination. It begins to emerge there that the spirited part of the soul is not just another irrational element in us like desire, but also rational to the extent that it can listen to and be persuaded by reason. Perhaps too, spirited but gentle souls need not be philosophic, but capable of recognizing and following the lead of those who are. The whole arrangement and significance of the three-part city and soul gains new depth for someone who is willing to work with the material left behind in his imagination by a faulty analogy, and that work will be all the more effective to the extent that it is his own. What Socrates has offered is not an answer or a theory or a doctrine, but a question, a suggestion, and an image, all of which tend to awaken our own powers.
Another example of a small image left behind early in the dialogue is Socrates’ brief reference in 351C to a gang of thieves. It is offered as a picture of the way injustice divides a group of people against itself, so that even an unjust purpose can be accomplished in common only by those who practice justice among themselves. Socrates generalizes this into a suggestion that justice, if one should ever come to understand it, would be what unites people. And since he goes on to ask about injustice within a single human being, we are left with the possibility that justice may be the power that makes any whole made of parts be capable of acting as one thing rather than many. Much later in the dialogue, when the three-part soul is connected with the four cardinal virtues of human character, justice seems to be an unnecessary remnant, and the formulations arrived at about it may not be very satisfying. A reader who has the gang-of-thieves picture in the back of his mind has something to work with to carry his understanding forward. But am I right to call this an image or picture at all? Is it not just one of a number of thinkable situations into which justice and injustice can be inserted as variables? There is certainly no development of it, and no sensory detail is used to make it vivid. But there is some confirmation in the text that it is intended to be used not just as something posited for analysis but as a reflection and likeness of things other than itself. Thrasymachus agrees to allow Socrates’ suggestion that justice unites people, not because he is persuaded of it but “so I won’t be at odds with you.” We are witnessing, in our imaginations, an interaction of people that looks a lot like the thing being discussed, even though it has nothing to do with thieves. If a connection is made, it will originate not in sorting through logical alternatives but in paying attention to the promptings of our lowly faculty of picturing things.
The image of the dog mentioned above is similarly short on imaginative detail, but Socrates explicitly calls it an image. Most of the images in the dialogue lack the elaboration of the cave analogy early in Book VII, or the myth of Er late in Book X, or Glaucon’s story early in Book II of Gyges’ ancestor who gained a magical power to become invisible whenever he pleased. But it is probably true that everything brought up to be thought about in the dialogue is connected with or embedded in something meant to engage the imagination first. Much of the dialogue is concerned with criticizing imitative poetry. It is a common observation that the Republic is itself a work of imitative poetry, and that Plato cannot therefore be serious about such criticism. But we might understand better what Plato is doing with his imitation if we look at what he shows us Socrates doing with his images. Every one of Socrates’ images is meant to lead beyond itself. The philosopher-dog and the gang of thieves are not offered to us for any inherent interest they might have. They engage our imaginations in order to take us beyond imagination altogether. They are like the example of the last three fingers on a hand that Socrates gives in 523A-E, to illustrate that the sense of sight sometimes blends contradictory attributes, and can arouse us to go beyond sight to insight. Only the intellect can resolve the discrepancies that sight first brings to our attention. People sometimes dismiss the example of the fingers by saying that large and small are only relative terms, not realizing that they have thereby proved Socrates’ point, since the word “relative” refers to nothing visible, but only to something intelligible. The senses contribute to philosophic reflection wherever they reveal inconsistencies that they themselves cannot resolve. In such cases we are compelled to climb the divided line, at least partway. This seems to me also to be what distinguishes Socratic image-making from the poetic imitations he questions. Every image Socrates gives us cries out for interpretation. None tempts us to remain absorbed in it as an end in itself.
Perhaps the most memorable image in the Republic is the cave analogy, but it remains with us not because of any beauty in its depiction but because it stimulates so rich and endless a process of interpretation. It does not overwhelm us with a sense that all questioning must recede in deference to its power. It is an image we are forever climbing out of, into a realm free of images. The three great images that come before us in the middle of the Republic—the sun, the line, and the cave—are on three different steps of the divided line. The sun is a direct sensory image of something belonging to its second segment. The divided line itself is a mathematical image belonging to the third. The cave analogy is an image of shadows, of artifacts, and of the turn toward the sensory originals above and behind them, the motion that takes place within the first segment. The three are all tied together, and this emphasizes that there is an absent fourth, a segment in which there can be no images. But the abundant material for thinking our way forward that the three images provide, separately and in all their interconnections, makes them step off the page into a dialectic in which we are already enacting the kind of thinking that Socrates assigns to the fourth level. For a reader who accepts the invitation to interpret its images, the Republic is an immersion into a philosophic education.
But the act of interpreting the divided line discloses nothing in it that implies a motion in only one direction. If an image achieves its purpose when it is replaced by an understanding free of images, the insight one may gain into intelligible things reciprocally calls out for confirmation by an application to examples in the imagination. If justice is giving back what one takes, what about weapons belonging to someone who has gone temporarily insane? This downward turn to the imagination at 331C begins a process that does not lose clarity or intelligibility but gains, deepens, and enhances them. The imagination is not left behind as a lower and lesser faculty, but is the mediating power that draws all our experience into one whole. The divided line is given first as undivided, continuous and one, and the ratios between its parts are all symmetrical, pointing upward no more than downward. The most striking mathematical implication of the divided line, to which attention is called in the notes to 511A and 534A, is that its second and third segments are equal in magnitude. That in turn makes either of them a mean proportional between the top and bottom segments, and that suggests that it may be the same power of the soul that appears in the visible realm as trust in the senses, and in the intelligible realm as reasoning based on assumptions. If this way of playing with the image has anything to it, the four segments of the divided line may after all be only three, and that would give us yet another three-part structure with a middle part that looks both upward and downward.
The cluster of images in which the divided line is central can now be seen as all about the reciprocal relations of higher and lower parts in ordered wholes. The sun shines on everything under it, not only as a source of illumination but as a source of growth. But what might be the most controversial passage in the dialogue is the discussion of the return of the philosopher to the cave (519C-520E). If the example of returning weapons to their rightful owner when he’s out of his mind begins a process of refining one’s thinking about justice, that process must culminate in a reader’s reaction to the necessity for the philosopher to return to an active role in a political community. The analogy to the soul does not remove the need to understand the return in terms of human interactions as well as within the interior life of anyone who has tasted a contemplative life. Glaucon is persuaded that he was wrong to see the demands of community life as an injustice to the philosopher, but Socrates’ argument leaves open the possibility that such obligations are not present outside the best city. But we have an example in front of us in Socrates himself of a philosopher living in a less-than-best city. The first word of the Republic means “I went down,” and the fact that Socrates spends so many hours down in the Piraeus means that he has chosen that as a better use of his time than anything he might have done back up in Athens. He refuses to be kept down below when Polemarchus merely insists on it from his own desire; he pretends to be tempted by the chance to see a torch race on horses when Adeimantus uses that to rekindle the curiosity that had brought him down from town in the first place; what finally tips the scales and persuades him to stay (328B) is Glaucon’s joining the others in a consensus that they should stay. From the moment a group of people draws together into a whole with a common interest, Socrates is persuaded to join the community, even if his purpose is to steer it toward a more worthwhile activity than the one it has in view.
The Piraeus, soon to be torch-lit not only for a horse race but also for an all-night party, turns out in retrospect to be the first image in the Republic that invites us to reflect on the possible uses that can be made of a life shared with others unlike oneself. The last such image is the myth that concludes the dialogue, in which all the souls that have been journeying through the heavens and under the earth, with the exception of a few who are incurably depraved, meet again in friendship in a meadow (614E) a few days’ march from the center of the cosmos, where everyone present has the chance to return to earth with a good and satisfying life. For each of them, that life is a result of choice, and their choices take place within sight of the shaft of light that extends from above throughout all the heavens and earth. Still, some of the souls make poor choices, relying on habits rather than on reflection. Their choices are influenced by all their experiences, and not always with all the clarity of sight of which each is capable. One may imagine, though, that the conversations they’ve shared so recently with one another about those experiences would make some of those choices better than they might otherwise have been, and thus make life on earth better and more civilized for them all.
The torchlight that represents so much of earthly life is only a half-light, that obscures as well as illumines. Only sunlight would be bright enough to illumine everything in visible range, and only at noon is it high enough to minimize all the shadows it also produces. But our nature as human beings does not seem to be fitted to dwell always in the noonday sun. Socrates, on the day he recounts in the Republic, chooses to spend the torch-lit hours in conversation in the Piraeus. When he tells Glaucon that justice brings the philosopher back into the cave (520B), he argues that, in the best city, the philosopher owes a debt to the city in return for the education it gave him. But we have already read the first six books of the dialogue by that point, and we know that the understanding of justice as paying debts has long since been left behind (331D). It made sense to the calculating soul of Cephalus, and nothing in him was roused to follow when the conversation moved on. His more spirited son Polemarchus was attracted by the idea that justice means helping friends and hurting enemies (332D), but that claim too soon lost its persuasiveness (335E). The democratic soul of Thrasymachus was positive that acting out of justice always means sacrificing one’s own interests to those of someone stronger (343C), but that view was at least neutralized by the end of Book I. Socrates himself eventually formulates what justice is in the cryptic phrase “doing what’s properly one’s own” (433B), but this is only after he has earlier made the point that recognizing a virtue such as justice depends on seeing the accord of a state of human character with a certain state of harmony in oneself (401D-402D), not on any accordance between an action and a definition. The image of Socrates, not arguing with opponents but conversing with friends, seems meant to allow us to bring justice to sight. The Republic also gives us abundant material to work with in order to think through what we might be seeing, and to come to an understanding of what it might have to do with happiness. In order to achieve that seeing, that thinking, and that understanding, we too must join the conversation.
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But why should the English-speaking world be subjected to yet another version of the Republic? Over the past forty years or so, I have read the dialogue all the way through in translation at least a dozen times. Whatever new translation I have read from time to time, I have always returned to that of Allan Bloom as by far the most accurate available. I have no serious complaints about Bloom’s translation, but the mere fact that it has held the field since 1968 is reason enough to try to discover whether a worthy alternative to it can be provided. I don’t seek to emulate Thrasymachus, who thinks an intelligent person would want to outdo any artful piece of work by someone else, but it is at least true that I don’t share Bloom’s preoccupations, and the different choices I have made may foster some new thought and discussion about an inexhaustible book. I depart a bit farther than Bloom does from the 19th century diction enshrined forever in such reference works as the lexicons of Liddell and Scott and the commentary of James Adam, without moving all the way into current colloquial speech. That sort of attempt to hit a moving target can never simply be a success. “You’re a damned shyster,” Raymond Larson’s version of a remark at 340D, no more captures the exact tone and content of the original than “Do you play the sycophant with me, my good sir?” would; it merely changes the manner of its obsolescence. Plato’s characters can be kept recognizably human and natural, speaking neither the English one might have heard in the rooms of an Oxbridge don in 1905, nor the sort one would find in barrooms, or chat rooms, in 2005.
Like Bloom, I have tried to respect the text as written. I have no desire to revise the author’s style to suit my own tastes, as Cornford did in 1941, or to recast a recollected conversation into the format of dramatic imitation, as C. D. C. Reeve’s 2004 version does. Reeve cites as a precedent for his liberties the character Eucleides, whom Plato presents as the transcriber of the conversation in the Theaetetus. But Eucleides was a slightly comic figure, used as a way of highlighting the opinion discussed in the first half of that dialogue that everything is in flux, never gathered up for contemplation in the act of recollection. Other defects of a dramatic as opposed to a narrative presentation are explicitly discussed in the Republic. Clearly such choices by Plato are not thoughtless or incidental, but intrinsic parts of intelligent and artful work, and if any author’s judgment is worthy of respect, this author’s is. But the example Bloom cites as a model translator is not one I would care to imitate either. William of Moerbeke translated the works of Aristotle on the assumption that Greek of the 4th century BC was a coded form of his own 13th century AD Latin, and could be transposed into it by a simple one-to-one substitution of prefix for prefix, root for root, and ending for ending. If that assumption is false, and no word in any natural language has the same range of meaning as any one word in another, then that sort of literalism has to sacrifice accuracy much of the time. Bloom, of course, is never guilty of such a foolish consistency, but I am less likely than he to regard a Greek word as too important to be allowed to vary with its context. Plato’s Greek is conversational, and words that others have taken in fixed senses always have a certain fluidity in his dialogues, as Socrates leads those around him, and us, to see more and more in them. To sacrifice the way in which both Plato and Socrates shift various aspects of meaning to the foreground may produce a literal translation, but it cannot be considered accurate translation.
One matter of fact that provides an occasion for a new round of translations of the Republic is the availability since 2003 of a newly edited version in the Oxford Classical Texts series. This is not a seismic shift, but it does produce a slight resettling of the ground beneath our feet. S. R. Slings has no major new discoveries to work from, but he reports consultation of an extensive array of evidence, including papyrus manuscripts and ancient translations into Middle Eastern languages. John Burnet’s Oxford text was kept in print for a century, but he and James Adam of Cambridge had many small disagreements based on their opinions of the relative trustworthiness of the various medieval manuscript traditions. I hereby declare that (with the two exceptions noted in 454B and 556E) I have trusted Slings’s scholarship to resolve all such discrepancies better than I could, but in fact most of the textual points in dispute are so small that they will be invisible to the reader within the inevitable differences among translations. To give one random example typical of many, at 370B where the text Bloom worked from has the word práxei, accented as a verb in the future, he translates it with the phrase “for the accomplishment,” while the text I used has prâxin, accented as a noun in the accusative, which I translate “in practice”; Reeve, basing his translation on the same text I used, leaves the word out of his English version altogether.
This volume contains a number of features designed to help the reader contend with the length and complexity of the dialogue. At the beginning of each of its ten books there is a listing of the main shifts among the principal speakers, identified by ranges of Stephanus numbers; these run from 327A to 621D, page numbers and page divisions from a 16th-century Greek edition of Plato’s works, now used universally as a standard pagination, and included here in the margins. Boldface type is used to mark the entrance into the discussion of a new speaker who will be talking with Socrates for an extended time, so you can always look back to the last boldface name, or to the list at the beginning of that book, to remind you who “he” is. There is also a brief prefatory note at the beginning of each book to summarize the content and flow of the discussion, and there are footnotes throughout. The latter serve various purposes, primarily to identify references and to mention anything I’ve learned over the years that has been particularly helpful to my reading of the dialogue. You shouldn’t take my word for any interpretation contained in these comments; I encourage you to use such notes for what they’re worth and dismiss them whenever your own thinking supersedes them. The glossary provides comments on some of the most important words used in the dialogue, when their exact meanings cannot easily be gathered from their uses in context; it may be worthwhile to read through the glossary before reading the dialogue. The index does not aspire to comprehensiveness in any respect; it has the more modest purpose of providing a sufficient array of signposts to help you find your way around among the various regions of the dialogue. Entries in the index are to the Stephanus pages within the text, or, when followed by the letter n, to the footnotes to them. The afterword is intended to balance the general discussion of the dialogue in this introduction with an example of a sustained exploration of a single major theme. An effort has been made throughout to choose all this supplementary material with a light touch, aimed at that happy medium which may assist an intelligent reading without overwhelming it.
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I first heard the Republic lectured about, in a class called Phil. 1 or something of the sort, when I was a freshman at Oberlin College in 1963. As for the content of that lecture, the kindest thing I can say is that the lecturer was dutifully performing a task for which his talents did not suit him. I had the good fortune the following year to start over as a freshman at St. John’s College, where I actually read the dialogue and took part in a number of discussions of it, led by Robert Bart, who knew how to meet a book on its own ground. In those classes, the turning around of the soul was not just an academic topic but an open opportunity. Not long after that, I heard Eva Brann give the splendid lecture “The Music of the Republic.” The occasion had a festive character, celebrated, as she walked off the stage, by three students who marched across it in costume suggestive of the Revolutionary War, with fife and drum. And shortly after I had graduated, I heard John White, who was then a graduate student, give a summer lecture that showed me that graduate study could be a way to carry one’s own thinking very far and very deep. Eva Brann’s lecture was the first version of the essay that is now the title piece of a book published in 2004 by the Paul Dry Press, and John White’s lecture on imitation was the forerunner of the essay included here as the afterword to this book. I recommend the former, and offer the latter here, to anyone who wants to get some idea why the Republic can be a source of lifelong learning. The breadth of imagination brought to bear by Eva Brann on seeing the dialogue whole, and the intensity of imagination sustained on one major topic in it by John White, show that this is a book that will reward all the powers anyone can summon to the reading of it.
I am grateful to Pamela Kraus, editor of the St. John’s Review, for permission to reprint John White’s piece, which appeared in an earlier version in that journal’s 1989-90 double issue on the Republic (Vol. XXXIX, Nos. 1 and 2). I am grateful also to Emily Kutler who lavished great care on bringing the torch and horses to life, to Robert Abbott who did most of the work on the index (and did so under difficult circumstances), and to Cordell Yee before whom all computer problems disappear. Eric Salem once again gave generously of his time, of which he has little, and his knowledge, of which he has much, by reading through an entire draft of the translation and suggesting countless improvements; an accurate brief description of Eric’s character may be found in the dialogue at 487A 2-5. The origin of this translation, in the realm of proximate causes, was a suggestion made by Mitchell Jones to Ron Pullins that the Focus Philosophical Library ought to have the Republic on its list. In the realm of deeper causes, what has been most responsible for the possibility of a project such as this is the community of learning at St. John’s College; as always, I am particularly grateful to all those who carry on the struggle, against all odds, to keep that small community going, and to keep it small enough to be what it is.
Annapolis, Maryland
Summer, 2006