Guide to the Republic as it sets up Plato s discussion of education in the Allegory of the Cave. The Republic is intended by Plato to answer two questions: (1) What IS justice? and (2) Is it better to be just than to be unjust?, where better refers to each person s objective of living a flourishing life (achieving what the Greeks called eudaimonia). Book II begins with a three-part division of goods everything that we value can be thought to be valuable (i) for its own sake alone (intrinsically valuable), (ii) for what comes of it alone (instrumentally valuable), and (iii) for both its own sake and for what comes from it. Plato thinks justice belongs in category (iii), but there is suspicion among his conversation partners that most people reject the idea that justice is valuable for its own sake. The public, opposing Plato, regard it as fitting into category (ii), like a trip to the dentist one doesn t act justly because acting justly is good in and of itself, but because if one acts justly, one will avoid punishment and gain the benefits of cooperation from society. In the eyes of unreflective people (and contrary to Plato s famous remark that it is indeed better to suffer injustice than to do it), it would be better to do injustice and not suffer it. To make the popular view of justice (that it is good only instrumentally) as strong as it can be, one of the characters tells the story of the Ring of Gyges, which allows its wearer to do injustice without detection (by men or by the Gods). The challenge to Plato is to explain why it is rational to do what is just even if one has the Ring of Gyges. Plato s response? We need to explain what justice is before we can explain why it is still better to act justly rather than unjustly (even with the Ring). This is the crucial move from talking about what an individual person has most reason to do to a discussion of a politics, a discussion about how a polis (or a city, the basic political entity in the ancient Greek world, comparable to a nation today) comes into existence and how it is most efficiently arranged. This crucial transition occurs at 368c-369a (p. 43). From here on out, the discussion is dominated by commentary about the polis/city, and what individual persons have best reason to do is almost non-existent. This is why many early readers (like Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius) took Plato s essay here to be primarily a theory about how best to run or design a city. The early discussion of the city asks why cities exist. Answer? Virtually no human individual is capable of providing all the things he or she needs to live (or live well). If, on the other hand, each individual lives with others, each will be able to secure the things that are necessary for life. But there are lots of ways to live, and Plato says the most efficient arrangement of the city 1 is a division of labor according to a principle of specialization each person is by nature especially suited to the performance of only one kind of activity, and each person ought to perform only that task for which he or she is by nature especially suited (370a-c). [The principle of specialization turns out essentially to be what justice is in both the city and in the individual, though we won t see this until much later.] Also important in Book II is the distinction drawn between a healthy city and a fevered or diseased city (372a-373a), where the fevered city is one that forsakes the limitation of necessity, in favor of luxury, for the principle of establishing public ends. This distinction foreshadows the 1 The arrangement of the city can be understood as the city s constitution. Think about the US Constitution it establishes how the society as a collective thing is organized and functions in its most basic outlines: the establishment of how collective decisions are made and carried out, and how disputes in the society are to be settled.
effects of justice and injustice in the soul (though again, nothing is explicit at this point). The possibility of luxurious cities also prompts Plato to recognize the emergence of a new class of people in the city beyond the original class of Producers (who produce the objects of material necessity. This new class of people in the fine city are the Guardians, which are later divided further into two different classes, the younger Auxiliaries and the Rulers. The Guardians, since they have a different kind of task in the city are going to have a different kind of nature and Book II ends with a discussion of just what their nature is like, and begins a discussion of education in the ideal city. Towards the end of Book III, Plato tells a story about how such an ideal theory might get started, a story that involves telling a noble lie. This story is notable for a few reasons. First, with respect to the political interpretation, the rulers are explicitly described as being the most important class in the society. Secondly, as if to counter the significance of the first point, the story illustrates that the rulers are subject to a very strict lifestyle (no privacy, no private property, common living quarters and meals). Third, there is another element of foreshadowing. An oracle warns that a city comes to ruin if the structure of the city is upset specifically, if the city ever has a producer ascend to the rank of ruler. The foreshadowing here is again about the effect of justice, or rather injustice, on the city (and by extension, on the individual). In Book IV (at 427d-e), another crucial move is made, one that depends on a framework that is common to many of the ancient eudaimonist theorists. Plato argues that if the city is founded and arranged properly (that is, as he has described in the book so far), the city will be completely good. And, if it is completely good, it will have to possess the virtues appropriate to a city. Why is this? Virtues and vices are prominent concepts in ancient ethics. Things in nature and things produced by art have a function (ergon) or characteristic function. Any property or quality of that object that enables it to function well is a virtue (arête), while any property or quality of that object that inhibits it from functioning well is a vice. If a thing functions well, this will be because it possesses the virtues appropriate to it (given its function). So, applied to a city, if the city functions well it will possess the virtues appropriate to it. So then, what are the virtues appropriate to a city? Plato identifies them as the virtues traditional to Greek culture: wisdom, courage, moderation and, finally, justice. From 428b to 432b, Plato describes and defines wisdom, courage and moderation, leaving justice to be analyzed from 432b to 434d. Notice how justice is akin to the principle of specialization, and how injustice is the essence of the thing the oracle warns about at the end of Book III. Notice also (at 433-d) that justice is said to be the most important of the virtues because it enables the acquisition of the other virtues. Likewise, injustice can be thought to make it impossible to acquire the other virtues. With this framework in place, Plato turns his attention to forging the analogy, connecting the city to the individual. This is begun at 434d. A little background is in order here as well. Plato makes reference to the soul here, and this is, again, a common view among ancient ethicists. Humans are most essentially their soul (psuche). While the soul comes to refer to something a bit mystical in Christianity, for the Greeks a reference to the soul was fairly straightforward: the soul is simply that part of our nature through which individuals live their lives. The soul is responsible for the shape and direction of our lives, the ends we choose to pursue in an effort to achieve what
we are all presumed to aim at in life a flourishing life (eudaimonia). 2 So, when Plato turns his attention to what it is for an individual to be just, and he begins his analysis by talking about the soul, he is, in effect, giving an account of human psychology. The first point to note about this psychological account is that humans are moved psychologically by different kinds of considerations (436a). There are appetites (437b), the rational calculating part (439d), and then the spirited part, distinguished from both the appetitive and the rational part (439e-441a). Having distinguished these three parts of our souls, Plato can then translate the political virtues (that is, the virtues of the city) into personal virtues (virtues of the person), treating the rational part of the soul as analogous to the rulers in the city, the spirited part of the soul as analogous to the auxiliaries, and the appetitive part of the soul as analogous to the producers. Wisdom, courage, moderation and, ultimately, justice are defined in exactly the same way, substituting parts of one s psychology for parts of the city in their definitions. The next major element of the Republic relative to the Allegory of the Cave to be explained involves two other metaphors, ones which convey epistemological (theory of knowledge) and metaphysical (the nature of what is real or what exists) points. These two stories are prompted by the thought that there might be something even more important to understand than the virtues (wisdom, courage, moderation or even the most important virtue, justice,). Socrates indeed concedes that there is, in fact, something more important than virtue knowledge of the form of, or the essence of, the good. Here, Plato, the author of the Republic, has the character Socrates say something much like the actual, historical Socrates was known for the characteristic denial of knowledge of the good. [The historical Socrates is portrayed by other writers as claiming not to know the nature of the most important things but that, in this recognition of ignorance, he nonetheless turns out to be better off, epistemologically, than ordinary people leading lives without philosophical reflection. Why? Because these people live their lives on the bases of beliefs about virtue and the good that are not examined and each time Socrates investigates their claims about how to live, he finds that their conceptions of the virtues and the good are rife with error and contradiction. Hence, the irony of the legendary declaration by the Oracle at Delphi Socrates, who professes to know nothing is, nonetheless, the wisest man in all of Athens.] But then Plato seems to have his character Socrates go a bit further than the historical Socrates in that the character in the story says that while he does not have genuine knowledge of the good, he can say what he thinks it must be like if any of our judgments about things being good can make sense (506e). And this is what he lays out at the end of Book VI in the Allegories of the Sun and the Line. Again, some background is useful here. For many of the Ancient Greeks, we can understand things we encounter in terms of the material nature and in terms of the formal nature. A thing s material nature is defined by what that thing is made of, while a thing s formal nature is how that material is structured or arranged or constituted. If you want to know the essence of a thing in nature, it is better to consider its formal nature rather than its material nature. 3 This is why Plato is concerned with the Form of the Good. All of the various things we call good must share something in virtue of which each of those things are good. Understanding the FORM of the Good allows one to understand what it is in virtue of which all good things are good, and enables 2 The soul in the individual is often thought by theorists going back as far as the ancients to be like a political community s constitution. 3 Those of you who have studied Aristotle can compare this discussion with Aristotle s complex notion of causation.
one to distinguish between those things that are genuinely good from those things which merely appear to be good. The details of the Allegory of the Sun and the Allegory of the Line are not entirely our direct concern here, but there is a crucial point to recognize regarding the connection between the Allegories of the Sun (knowledge) and Line (reality) and the Allegory of the Cave (education). The most important thing for persons to learn is not a mere descriptive fact like the cause of the universe might be a merely descriptive fact. Rather, it is a claim about what is valuable the essence of goodness. Why is this significant? Well, each of us presumably wants to live a good life a life genuinely (and not merely apparently) good or worthy of pursuit (again, we aim for eudaimonia). But our goal to live well is not likely to be successful if we are entirely unconcerned with figuring out what the nature of goodness is, what it is that makes a life genuinely worthy of pursuit. Socrates encounters with his fellow Athenians, who are routinely shown to be mistaken about things even they themselves SAY and SINCERELY BELIEVE are important to living well (justice, piety, courage, etc), reinforce this very point. 4 So, for Plato, what it is most important to have an understanding of is not a bunch of scientific facts or definitions or an understanding of how to discover them or compute them. Rather, it is most important to understand how best to live so as to live well, our basic goal in the first place. These other descriptive facts information might be useful in terms of discovering efficient means to our ends, but knowledge of all this information will be unlikely to contribute to happiness if one is committed to ends that are not genuinely good. This sets the table for Plato s story of education, in which he explicitly denies that education is putting either information or a capacity to think into the student s head. Rather it is, metaphorically, about turning the soul around to consider critically what is genuinely worthy of pursuit. How does this turning of the soul around, which is the explicit aim of education in the Allegory of the Cave, make sense? Here, we see can see a link between the view of education with Plato s answer about why it is better (in terms of eudaimonia) to be just than to be unjust, one of the two basic questions animating the Republic. Plato s answer to the basic question consists in three different arguments expressed in Book IX. The first argument builds on an extended discussion in Book VIII about different constitutional arrangements for cities and different arrangements in the soul. This first argument can be set aside (since I didn t make available that discussion from Book VIII). The second argument is an indirect argument that, as my description suggests, doesn t directly conclude that it is better to be just than to be unjust (but the argument will be familiar to those students who have read Chapter Two of John Stuart Mill s Utilitarianism). The more direct claim, one Plato himself regards as the most decisive of the lines of reasoning supporting his view that it is better to be just than to be unjust, is the third argument found in Book IX. What is crucial for understanding this argument and its connection to the Platonic view of education is the discussion of the different sources of pleasure for humans and their relative contributions to living well or living a genuinely good life. Recall that one s soul (psuche) is essentially that part of us, our psychology, through which we give shape and direction to our lives with the goal of living well. Plato argued, as we saw, that our souls are complex, meaning that we are influenced by different things. In Book IX (as he did earlier in parts of the Republic not covered here), Plato now indicates that each part of the soul 4 This is what much of Book I of the Republic is like, and most of Plato s other early, shorter dialogues are like.
corresponds to a different pleasure. The appetitive part of our soul, when satisfied, gives us the pleasures associated with the bodily pleasures (the pleasures associated with eating and eating well, drinking and drinking fine drink, sex, and the like). The spirited part of our nature is associated with the pleasures we get when we are well regarded by others, while the rational part of our nature is associated with the pleasures associated with contemplative activity and understanding. These pleasures are not all alike, and do not contribute in the same way to happiness. The third argument that favors a just life over an unjust life is one that assesses the pleasures relative to each part of our psychology, concluding that only a just life enables one to achieve the best sort of pleasure that associated with rational activity. Education is about recognition of which sorts of pleasures one ought to organize one s life around. Justice and education go hand in hand. Education allows for the acquisition of a just or well-ordered psychology which makes possible the kind of activity that gives rise to the best pleasures and the best life. In an unjust soul, reason cannot engage in its primary natural activity and must, instead, serve as a mere slave or instrument to the gratification of one s desires for material or reputational pleasure. This is to live a life that fails to live up to one s natural potential.