That Wisdom May Rule: Book VI of Plato’s Republic

Socrates opens discussion in the sixth book with what amounts to a premise, but one that gives a clearer definition of a philosopher, how to tell the true from false sort: “Since the philosophers are those who are capable of apprehending that which is eternal and unchanging.”1 Those who are blind to “the veritable knowledge of the being of things, those who have no vivid pattern in their souls … [cannot] fix their eyes on the absolute truth,”2 so the ideal of the society is meaningless to them.

Why, though, are philosophers uniquely competent to rule? One succinct answer he gives that is relevant to the form of justice is that “this trait of the philosophical nature … is ever enamored of the kind of knowledge which reveals to them something of that essence which is eternal, and is not wandering between the two poles of generation and decay.”3 That means that they will be more attracted to what the law should be rather than what it happens to be. The former is an eternal object, the latter a temporal one. Further down he says,

it was the nature of the real lover of knowledge to strive emulously for true being and that he would not linger over the many particulars that are opined to be real, but would hold on his way, and the edge of his passion would not be blunted nor would his desire fall till he came into touch with the nature of each thing in itself by that part of his soul to which it belongs to lay hold on that kind of reality.4

Recall that for Socrates, justice was not only an ideal to measure acts and laws by but a virtue to cultivate in the soul. Real philosophers, and thus the best sort of leaders, must have no touch of “illiberality.”5 He would surely love of truth, and be wholly unwilling to let falsehood ever enter the mind.6

Psuedo-Philosophers

Adimantus raises the popular misgiving that the whole lot of philosophers are “cranks, not to say rascals, and those accounted the finest spirits among them are still rendered useless to society by the pursuit which you commend.”7 Things have not changed. Indeed, moderns are even less disposed to let philosophers near anything much of value.

Socrates replies by means of the parable of the true navigator versus the false. There is a true navigator, or “pilot,” and then a bunch of rogues on board with him who spend their time fighting for who can be king of the boat, even killing each other. Interestingly, none of them believe there is such a thing as an essence of navigation—no connection between trajectories at sea and the stars to which the mind has access. Now the true art of navigation stands for true philosophy, the wrangling sailors who have never learned it are the false “philosophers.” The question posed by the parable is simple: What impression will onlookers have of navigation, even if a true navigator comes along? The answer is plain to Adimantus. No wonder, then, that all will take the philosopher as such a “star-gazer.”

There is a sudden application to political form that the reader should not miss.

For it is not the natural course of things that the pilot should beg the sailors to be ruled by him or that the wise men should go to the doors of the rich ... But the true nature of things is that ... everyone who needs to be governed to the door of the man who knows how to govern, not that the ruler should implore his natural subjects to let themselves be ruled, if he is really good for anything.8

The lesson is twofold. If false philosophers have abused philosophy, still, the people have not bothered to use the true philosopher. If we are in the ship in which we cannot tell one from the other, we are going down. And the one who would rule by justice must only speak with those who know, and not pander to those who do not. There is no time to lose, and the rabble will not suddenly turn into wise-men simply because they ought. The latter pandering is democracy; the former counsel of the wise is an aristocracy. If it would be absurd to expect literal sheep to do an internet search for a qualified shepherd, it is no less absurd for the majority of human beings to be voting. Small children should not be gifted with rocket propelled grenades, and non-philosophers should not be directing armed forces. It is a good way for many innocent people to get killed.

Socrates had another question to answer. We must discover not only why the public sees no use for philosophy, but why those who may start out on the true path become corrupted to become one of these psuedo-philosophers. In the first place, these begin to “usurp its pursuits,”9 in the same way as he earlier spoke of those who pose in a different class than the one their “metal” was meant for. Now, he uses an analogy of seeds which depend for their proper growth on the right environment. More than that, the best gifts tend toward the worst corruptions when such seeds meet their opposite environments. The mere simple creatures who cannot attain such virtues also are incapable of as much vice. We may replace a horse, but never put him on trial.

Private instruction will be no contest for the pressures of public opinion. Interestingly, Socrates here makes the Sophists, who charge a fee, to be the echo of the public opinion, and thus the latter have the chief fault.10 Then there are the lobbyists. Socrates does not call them that, but he says: “His kinsmen and fellow citizens, then, will desire, I presume, to make use of him when he is older for their own affairs ... Then they will fawn upon him with petitions and honors, anticipating and flattering the power that will be his.”11

Returning to the Sophists, we must consider the link between education and this corruption:

We know it to be universally true of every seed and growth, whether vegetable or animal, that the more vigorous it is the more it falls short of its proper perfection when deprived of the food, the season, the place that suits it. For evil is more opposed to the good than to the not good … So it is, I take it, natural that the best nature should fare worse than the inferior under conditions of nurture unsuited to it.

Then comes the conclusion: “that the best endowed souls become worse than the others under a bad education? Or do you suppose that great crimes and unmixed wickedness spring from a slight nature and not from a vigorous one corrupted by its nurture, while a weak nature will never be the cause of anything great, either for good or evil?”12

What these two do together—public sloth and educational sophistry—creates a beast that is too big to put back into its cage. The ignorant mass of the citizenry is that beast. They quite literally become less and less like humans and politics becomes the “art” of placating their warring passions. The sophist is essentially teaching the young “philosopher” to master speech so as to harness the beast, to placate it, which is to say, to master a soothing leadership after which such a “philosopher” or politician will be follower of the mob, only managing it.

Elections will be won by those who can make the most menacing parts of the beast purr. Such a promising young managerial prospect knows “nothing in reality about which of these opinions and desires is honorable or base, good or evil, just or unjust, but should apply all these terms to the judgments of the great beast, calling the things that pleased it good, and the things that vexed it bad.”13 His trained rhetoric more like a mastery in snake-charming.

At long last, the Christian needs to resolve that Socrates himself is naive about the solution. This is much in the same way as he was naive about the relationship between justice and harm—that is retributive justice—whereas he would offer only education as a remedy. Here too about the prospects of the majority being persuaded: “They will surely be of another mind if in no spirit of contention but soothingly and endeavoring to do away with the dispraise of learning you point out to them whom you mean by philosophers.”14 Certainly one of the roles of education is preventive in this very respect. Books must restrain beasts while it is morning. Yet when its heads have multiplied and its tentacles have laid final siege, one can only cut at its sinews and escape to rebuild on other shores.

The Good

We must turn the true philosopher positively to his end. Education can not be occupied indefinitely with those who will not learn, must less with those actively trying to undermine the cause of truth. “No child left behind” is not a slogan that would have carried any weight with Plato. At any rate, “the lover of wisdom associating with the divine order will himself become orderly and divine in the measure permitted to man.”15 We become like what we behold. Even the pagan understood this. The question will concern the limits of our horizon.

Socrates asks whether such contemplation of the divine, in addition to shaping his soul to be more like the divine, would also rightly produce the art which shapes the city in the same. He is compared to a “craftsman” of those cardinal virtues.16 If that is true, and if philosophers must rule, then constitutions must be redrawn to the divine image. Why should it not? Whatever is less than God which we conform not to God is our true god—which spells idolatry and rebellion. The truth is that we hate ourselves and the constitution we are under if we will not maintain it by this constant and vigilant conformity.

By treating our highest civic constitution as sacrosanct, as actually immutable, we are guaranteeing its more malevolent malleability at the hands of those who have no regard for the life, liberty, and property it was designed to uphold. By contrast, to conform it to this “image of God” is to conform human law to eternal law via the natural and divine—to constantly ask ourselves in what sense this or that law truly protects the kind of being man is from various forms of violence.

When pressed by the brothers as to the identity of this highest study, which will cultivate this civic virtue, Socrates answers, by way of reminder, that “the idea of good by reference to which just things and all the rest become useful and beneficial.”17 It is agreed that without the knowledge of this good, we could know nothing else. Others who seem to know this, Socrates says, define things in a circle—that what is good is to know the good, etc. Then about pleasure, those who hold it is the essence of good will be forced to admit that there are bad pleasures as well as good. Note then that knowledge can be of the good or the bad, and pleasures can be good or bad. Hence, if they are of the same essence, then good is bad and bad is good in both cases.

In this context, Socrates anticipates Aristotle’s discussion on good and ends, and yet discusses ignorance of them—so that if the chief end is lost as “the good” so all good is lost in subordinate ends.18 The context here, though, is what the guardian must know. He must know exactly how justice and the other virtues relate to the good.

As with the other essences Socrates discusses in the dialogues, here with the Good, there is a one and a many. There is the essence and there are examples. He follows this here by dividing between two classes, one of things that “can be seen but not thought” and another of “the ideas that can be thought but not seen.” Each has a corresponding instrument that does the “perceiving,” whether sight is used literally or figuratively.19

Then comes the famous imagery designed to illuminate this Good.

Have you ever observed, said I, how much the greatest expenditure the creator of the senses has lavished on the faculty of seeing and being seen? … Do hearing and voice stand in need of another medium so that the one may hear and the other be heard, in the absence of which third element the one will not hear and the other not be heard? … But do you not observe that vision and the visible do have this further need?20

Thus, light is that nobler thing that bonds these two together. What then? He wants to avoid the language of the pagan pantheon—Which deity is responsible?—and thus it is the sun. That is, the literal sun in our universe. Here is the familiar point in any good analogy. Now, moving further into the analogy, vision is the “most sunlike” of all the senses. Actually it is the “influx” or “influence” of that light that the sun gives. Neither is the sun sight, but is its Author. This is what he means by the “child of good.” The literal sun, then, is like, in the visible world, what this Good is in the invisible and intellectual world.

Furthermore, as the eyes behold the realm in which the sun shines brightly, and dimly where it does not; so in the life of the soul, when it beholds the realm in which the Good illuminates, the mind knows, and merely opines when turning back upon the realm of appearances and becoming.21 In the latter case, one goes around blinking, becoming himself, being of one opinion at one time and another the next.

How are knowledge and truth both illuminated? Although Plato does not have Socrates draw it out in a technical sense, the key passage is this:

This reality … that gives their truth to the objects of knowledge and the power of knowing to the knower, you must say is the idea of good, and you must conceive it as the cause of knowledge, and of truth insofar as known. Yet fair as they both are, knowledge and truth, in supposing it to be something fairer still than these you will think rightly of it.22

The Divided Line

Having introduced the Good in its likeness to the sun, and the eye of the intelligible world to the eye of the world of appearances, Socrates draws out the implications for both epistemology and education. He asks the brothers—and, through them, Plato asks his reader—to imaging a line, and then a second line intersecting these. At first this appears as a tetrad of squares as on what we now know as the Cartesian coordinate graph. Then, if one takes the two lower quadrants and subdivides each in half, now there is something of a spectrum of four sections below the horizontal line. I say a spectrum because Socrates clearly means to represent a progression to greater “light” or knowledge on one end, and total “darkness” or ignorance on the other, with the two mediate positions.

The point is to put the imagery of the sun as the Good and the imagery of the Divided Line together. He who knows knows being, even when he is considering something in the realm of becoming. The person who merely opines does not know flatly nothing. How could nothing be known? They agree that it could not. Hence there is a spectrum between that pure light of knowledge and that utter darkness of ignorance. Why? Because these correspond, in our faculties, to a spectrum between being and nothingness. Between these two are the shadowlands of becoming, which is not nothing, but a parade of appearances that alternatively participate in being and are deprived of being, as time marches on.

Socrates’s most plain metaphysical description is “that the objects of knowledge not only receive from the presence of the good their being known, but their very existence and essence is derived to them from it, though the good itself is not essence but still transcends essence in dignity and surpassing power.”23

A helpful summary is offered by Markos in saying that “those who study objects themselves rather than the imitations of those objects are participating in a higher order of thinking.”24 No one deals in this metaphysical trade more than geometers.

And do you not also know that they further make use of the visible forms and talk about them, though they are not thinking of them but of those things of which they are a likeness, pursuing their inquiry for the sake of the square as such and the diagonal as such, and not for the sake of the image of it which they draw? And so in all cases. The very things which they mold and draw, which have shadows and images of themselves in water, these things they treat in their turn as only images, but what they really seek is to get sight of those realities which can be seen only by the mind.25

Now the method by which those—not merely “geometers” in our strict modern sense, but true philosophers—must contemplate all of this in proper order is by a kind of ascent of the mind. This he calls, more technically, dialectic. This is not to be thought of in the modern connotations of Hegel or others, for whom a historical development was driven by either idealist or materialist forces. Rather, it means rational demonstration. It is more than mere dialogue. It is a logical discovery with a metaphysical expectation. But because this is not natural to us, something must explain how the process of ascent can get started. It is to that which we turn in the seventh book.

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1. Republic, VI:484b

2. Republic, VI:484c, d

3. Republic, VI:485a-b

4. Republic, VI:490a-b

5. Republic, VI:486a

6. Republic, VI:485c

7. Republic, VI:487d

8. Republic, VI:489b

9. Republic, VI:491a

10. Republic, VI:493a-b

11. Republic, VI:494b

12. Republic, VI:491d-e

13. Republic, VI:493b, c

14. Republic, VI:499e

15. Republic, VI:500d

16. Republic, VI:500d

17. Republic, VI:505a-b

18. Republic, VI:505e-506a

19. Republic, VI:507b-c

20. Republic, VI:507c-e

21. Republic, VI:508d-e

22. Republic, VI:508e-509a

23. Republic, VI:509b

24. Markos, From Plato to Christ, 17.

25. Republic, VI:510d-e