(As I read more of this text, I will keep adding to this post with book-by-book summaries, so don’t forget to come back and check for updates later.)
“The final outcome of education, I suppose we’d say, is a single newly finished person, who is either good or the opposite.”
Book I
In the first book of Plato’s Republic, Socrates debates with the elderly Cephalus, his son Polemarchus, and Plato’s brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus. They talk over many complex ideas, including the true meaning of justice; why, or if, we should be just; and if we are happier or less happy if we act justly.
Thrasymachus claims that justice is “the advantage of the stronger.” He says not only that one is happier when one is unjust, and that justice is an abstract convention which should be ignored entirely, but further that one is only happy when one is wholly unjust in every respect, like a king conquering a foreign land and enslaving its people:
“If someone commits only one part of injustice and is caught, he’s punished and greatly reproached – such partly unjust people are called temple-robbers, kidnappers, housebreakers, robbers, and thieves when they commit these crimes. But when someone, in addition to appropriating their possessions, kidnaps and enslaves the citizens as well, instead of these shameful names he is called happy and blessed, not only by the citizens themselves, but by all who learn that he has done the whole of injustice. Those who reproach injustice do so because they are afraid not of doing it but of suffering it. So, Socrates, injustice, if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice.”
Socrates manages to dismantle this argument, though there are instances where any reader can spot some obvious fallacies in Socrates’ counter-arguments. Socrates vaguely proposes that justice equates with wisdom and virtue, and injustice with ignorance and vice. The book ends with neither of them really any closer to discovering the true definition of justice, only more doubtful of their initial convictions of its nature.
Book II
In this book, Socrates and Glaucon discuss the nature of justice and its place in the ideal utopian society. Glaucon begins by asking Socrates to place justice within one of three categories, categories which he claims encompass all such abstract nouns as justice: those which we seek and desire only for their consequences, like medical treatment; those which we desire only for their own sake, like joy; and those of the highest class, which we desire for both their own sake in the present and for their consequences, such as general health. Socrates places justice within the last and highest category, contrary to the seemingly common belief that justice is only sought for its consequences.
Glaucon, playing devil’s advocate, pretends to disagree with Socrates to challenge his argument further. He claims that people would actually rather be unjust than just, because in his opinion being unjust benefits the person both at the time at which they are being unjust, and in the future as a consequence of their unjust actions. At this point Glaucon’s brother Adeimantus chimes in with his idea that it is only the appearance of being just that people seek.
Socrates responds to this by mentally founding a city, as they all agree that it is easier to find what justice means to a group of people than to an individual. So begins the founding of Plato’s kallipolis: the concept of a perfectly ideal city.
Socrates, Glaucon and Adeimantus begin by agreeing on which professions are necessary for a city, which include the soldiers whom Socrates calls the “guardians” of the city. He argues that the citizens of the kallipolis should have an appreciation for and love of poetry, philosophy and art, and then begins the highly controversial idea that certain pieces of literature should be banned from being read by children. In our modern society, this immediately seems like an absurd and totalitarian idea, but on a second reading there seems to be some sense in what Socrates has proposed. He gives examples of violent stories and of fables containing disrespectful depictions of the gods and human behaviour, and argues that children should not be exposed to such corrupting and untruthful messages. In my opinion, he is right. Why present young and innocent children with disturbing television, video games and literature (though of course some of these examples cannot apply to the time in which Socrates lived) when they could be reading beautiful books and watching wholesome television infused with the true and good?
However, the idea that the government should actually ban these books is something that I do not agree with. That said, after a while of living in a society filled only with goodness, truth and beauty and not with poorly written and corrupting literature, the citizens would seek only those three virtues, and would not want their children to be exposed to anything else, rendering the act of banning certain pieces of literature unnecessary.
Book Two concludes with Socrates listing certain authors, like Homer and Hesiod, and explaining why children shouldn’t be allowed to read them (typically because they contain disrespectful pictures of the gods as being petty, quarrelsome and by no means omnipotent).
Book III
Socrates now goes on to describe exactly which books and poems should be allowed and which should be banned in the kallipolis. He advocates banning books that contain any notion of the horror of the Underworld, in case this should make soldiers scared of dying, and therefore make them cowardly and careful soldiers. He then discusses which style of writing should be forbidden, in terms of meter and lyric form.
Socrates and Adeimantes then discuss the physical training which guardians must undergo. The aged philosopher claims it is necessary to get the right balance between physical training and mental training (such as reading poetry or creating art): if one does too much of the former, one will become too obsessed with one’s fitness and figure and not mindful enough of art and literature; if, on the other hand, one reads and writes and creates too much, one will neglect one’s physical fitness and health and prove unhelpful on the battlefield.
Near the end of Book Three, we are introduced to one of Plato’s famous myths: the myth of the metals, a benevolent lie which Socrates claims he would deliberately tell to the citizens of the kallipolis to instill in them a sense of hierarchy and social class. The myth goes that the gods filled the citizens’ souls with a type of metal before they were born. Citizens born with gold in their souls would become the rulers of the city; a silver soul meant an auxiliary; and those born with bronze or iron souls were the craftsmen of the kallipolis.
Book IV
Adeimantus is concerned that the guardians do not sound like very happy people, but Socrates explains that the aim of the kallipolis is not to make one group happier than any others, but to make everyone in the city as happy as they can be given their role in the kallipolis. He likens the case to the painting of a statue. He claims that no one would paint the eyes of the statue a more beautiful colour than black – say, purple – because no one has purple eyes, and the statue as a result would look worse than if each individual feature had been dealt with appropriately, even if the eyes, when taken by themselves, looked nicer purple. And so each group in the city should be dealt with as the features of a statue should be: appropriately, and correctly, so that the city benefits from this treatment as a whole.
Socrates then goes on to lay straight the financial situation of the city. He gets Adeimantus to agree that a worker can neither be too poor nor too rich: he cannot be too poor, lest he cannot afford the best tools for his trade and thus produces sloppier work, which he will teach incorrectly to his sons; and he can neither be too rich, lest he shirks his work for the luxury of a comfortable sofa.
Socrates now makes an interesting point: that this kallipolis, if it is truly just, has no need for laws. He believes that if the citizens are given the education which he elaborated on in Books II and III, lawful behaviour would only come naturally to them, rendering specific laws over more trivial things – like contracts, and money lending – unnecessary. I fail to see any true flaw in his argument for, if the education of the citizens has really instilled goodness, truth and beauty within them, he is surely correct in assuming that unlawful behaviour would horrify them.
“It isn’t appropriate to dictate to men who are fine and good. They’ll easily find out for themselves whatever needs to be legislated about such things.”
Plato now hurries the debate back to education and the preservation of traditions. Socrates claims that any small change within the system will bring the whole thing to ruins:
“Those in charge must cling to education and see that it isn’t corrupted without their noticing it, guarding it against everything. Above all, they must guard as carefully as they can against any innovation in music and poetry or in physical training that is counter to the established order. … When lawlessness has established itself, it flows over little by little into characters and ways of life…into private contracts [from which] it makes its insolent way into the laws and government, until in the end it overthrows everything, public and private.”
Socrates now begins to hunt for the virtues of moderation, wisdom and courage in the city. He finds moderation and temperance in all three classes of the city, courage in the soldiers, and wisdom in the rulers. Having found the virtues in the city, he now turns to the individual, and discovers that virtue can be found in the balance of the three categories in the tripartite soul, the three categories being the appetitive, spirited and rational desires. So long as the rational desires rule over the appetitive and spirited ones, one can be sure of one’s virtue.
* I stopped reading this for a while when GCSEs got in the way, and picked it up again now, in August 2022. *
Book V
Socrates now tries to continue with the discussion of vice and virtue in the city, but is interrupted by his listeners, who all want him to clarify a passing comment he made earlier about the sharing of wives and children among the people of the kallipolis. In order to do so Socrates attempts to devise the role of women in the kallipolis. He first establishes with Glaucon the similarities and differences between men and women. They both agree that “one sex [men] is much superior to the other in pretty well everything, although many women are better than many men in many things.” Socrates owns that women are “believed to excel” in activities such as “baking cakes and cooking vegetables.”
However, Socrates also says that men and women do share a commonality in the relevant aspects – that is, their tendencies to be either rational, appetitive or spirited people. Because of this, Socrates says that men and women should both be trained and educated in the same way, so that women should be able to take on political roles and careers just the same as men.
Socrates goes on to suggest that men and women should be bred like farm animals in order to produce the strongest, most good-looking and intelligent offspring. He says that children should be taken from their parents at birth and taken to the “rearing pen”, where the city as a whole will raise all the children there as their own and no one will know who is actually related to whom. Socrates believes this will make the kallipolis one unified place in which all responsibilities and aims are shared by all the citizens.
Socrates now briefly digresses to talk about warfare. He says that children who are training to be guardians should be brought into battle on horseback and watch the fighting, to learn through experience. When it comes to prisoners of war, Socrates specifies that any Greek prisoner of war should not be enslaved or robbed from, because all Greeks should be unified and any differences between them will soon be resolved. However, if the prisoner is not a Greek, the citizens of the kallipolis may do anything they choose with them.
Glaucon asks Socrates how the citizens of the kallipolis could possibly be persuaded to live in such a bizarre way, particularly as regards the men’s relationship with women and children. Socrates warns that his answer will come across as very radical. He says that this system will only work if the rulers of the city are philosophers, thereby introducing the concept of philosopher-kings. He specifies that these philosophers must be able to perceive and understand the “forms” of things, because only those who can understand forms have knowledge and are therefore able to rule a place well.
Book VI
Socrates now goes on to explain why philosophers should be kings of the city: philosophers, he says, are (or should be) lovers of truth, who actively strive for truth and always reject falsehood. The pursuit of truth is just, Socrates says; and because it is the rational part of the soul that pursues truth, the soul of a philosopher is just. Therefore philosophers should be made the kings of the kallipolis.
Adeimantus points out that all the philosophers he has ever known have been useless. Socrates agrees that he has only ever known useless philosophers as well, and suggests that it is the upbringing of these people that has allowed them to turn out that way. People with a natural philosophical inclination, Socrates says, are always exploited for it by friends and relatives and so learn not to act in a truthful and philosophical way. And so other people who are not philosophers at all are encouraged to stand in their place, and become leaders instead, even though they are useless and foolish. Socrates goes on to explain that the few true philosophers who have not been exploited are rejected from society anyway, because society has wrongly learnt to oppose the philosopher’s ideals. This will not be a problem in Socrates’ city, he says, because the society there will hold those ideals too, and will naturally appoint the philosophers to be their rulers.
Socrates specifies that the education given to a potential philosopher-king should focus on getting him to understand the Form of the Good. Only once someone understands this can they hope to be good and just and, therefore, good leaders. Socrates is unable to clarify exactly what the Form of the Good is, because some people think good generally means pleasure, and others think it means knowledge, but really it means neither, or some combination of both (he is rather unclear). Socrates instead goes with the idea that the good is simply “the offspring of the good”, i.e. whatever is most like the good, given that we cannot hope to know exactly what the good is. He gives an analogy to make himself clear: the analogy of the Sun, which states that as the Sun is the source of visibility in the visible realm, the good is the source of intelligibility. And while the Sun allows us to see by allowing light into our eyes, so the good allows us to be intelligent by providing us with knowledge. And while the Sun allows things to come to be in the visible world (such as allowing plants to grow and animals to reproduce), so too does the good allow things to come to be in the intelligible world, through the production of the Forms.
Socrates now recounts the analogy of the Line. He tells us to imagine a line split into the following segments by descending proportion: understanding, thought, belief and imagination. Belief and imagination are what give us access to the visible world, and understanding and thought are the components of the intelligible one. Socrates considers imagination the least noble form of using one’s brain, for want of better phrasing, and understanding to be the most noble. But he admits that in order for someone to reach this very admirable level of knowledge, one has to work up from the bottom, from imagination. The person in question only reaches this highest level of knowledge once he has attained complete understanding of the Form of the Good.
Book VII
At the beginning of this book, Plato introduces us to his famous Allegory of the Cave. Socrates demonstrates the dangerous difference between reality and interpretation, and the positive effects of education and pursuit of truth, by inviting Glaucon to imagine a group of men who have spent their entire lives tied up in a dark cave, looking at a blank wall. Behind them, behind a wall of fire, people are waving statues of animals and things, which displays the silhouettes of these statues on the wall which the men are facing. Thus, the men believe that they are saying the things, and give the things names, without it ever occurring to them that these silhouettes are actually the shadows of statues of the things.
Socrates says that one of the men somehow escapes and looks past the wall. He sees the statues, and at first he does not believe that what he is seeing now is the next step towards how things actually are, and that what he thought all his life were real things were just shadows of statues. He makes his way out of the cave, and only then realises that even these things were not the real things, but merely statues. Finally, he looks up to the skies, and realises that it is the light given by the Sun (which here represents the Form of the Good) which enables him to see these things as they truly are. But when he goes back to the cave to encourage everyone else to come outside with him, they do not believe his stories of the outside world. Socrates even suggests they would try to kill him if he attempted to move them forcefully.
The Allegory of the Cave ties in with Socrates’ previously mentioned Allegory of the Line: the prisoners in the first stage represent the lowly imagination phase; the prisoner when he sees the statues represents someone in the more noble belief phase; when he goes further and discovers the real, physical things, he has entered the thought phase; and when he recognises that it is the light provided by the Sun which enables him to understand all these things, he has reached the understanding stage of the Line.
Socrates suggests that the aim of education should be to move a person as far away from the cave as possible. It should teach the soul to pursue the right desires and goals, and to reach understanding of the Form of the Good. The sort of person who is successfully changed by this kind of education is fit to be a philosopher-king. However, Socrates says they must periodically go back into the cave to attempt to enlighten the prsioners who have thus far refused to leave.
Socrates explains that the sort of person who can come to understand the Form of the Good must first undergo a lengthy but highly important education. (Indeed, it struck me as odd when reading this that the philosopher-kings-to-be must undergo their political and all other training before seeing and understanding the Form of the Good. How can they know how to rule and act justly if they have no understanding of the Form of the Good yet?)
The philosopher explains that this lengthy education mainly consists of rigorous grounding in maths and dialectic, with maths acting as the preparation for the highest form of study, dialectic. If they have not been properly grounded in mathematics before being introduced to philosophical dialectic, Socrates speculates, a person will argue simply for the sake of arguing, like a child might, without actually intending to discover any truth or get anything out of the conversation.
Socrates now lays out what sort of a person someone must be in order to deserve this education. He says children who are observed to be conscientious, hard-working, bright and enthusiastic about learning should be chosen. Socrates admits that the children will not necessarily want to sit down and learn hard maths, so instead he proposes that they be taught it through the medium of play and experience, so that they will enjoy the subject and therefore better remember the lessons it teaches. Further, the learning of maths should not be mandatory, so that the children who genuinely want to learn it can be distinguished from those who don’t and choose not to.
The next stage of education is to be trained physically for the next two years straight. Learners in this stage must spend all their time exclusively physically training. They cannot continue their maths or begin their dialectic studies because they will simply be too exhausted.
As each stage of education is completed, the learners who excelled best in it will be moved forward to the next stage, and those who performed worst will be effectively disqualified, and instead encouraged to become auxiliaries.
After their physical training is complete, the now young adults begin their dialectic studies. They must also complete fifteen years of training in politics. Interestingly, Socrates makes it clear that the philosopher-kings will “spend most of his time with philosophy, but, when his turn comes, he must labour in politics and rule for the city’s sake, not as if he were doing something fine, but rather something that has to be done.” The mildly contemptuous way in which Socrates speaks of political rule makes one wonder why fifteen years of the study of it is so integral to an intelligent person’s education.
To complete their education, the now almost middle-aged students will be sent back into the “cave” to guide the others as aforementioned.
When Glaucon asks how the kallipolis could possibly actually come about, Socrates offers a solution that I for one certainly did not expect. He proposes that they should simply invade an already existing city, deport anyone over the age of ten, and start to build the city by beginning their education system on whoever is left.