Philosopher Kings and Queens: Republic 5

Socrates is ready to conclude his argument that justice is valuable in itself when his companions object, wanting to know more about his proposal to cede marriage contracts and child-rearing to the state (see 423e-424a). This represents the first of three “waves” of objections. Socrates’s response will take up the next three books of Republic. Along the way, we get some of antiquity’s most progressive thinking about gender equality, an argument for eugenics, reflections on the nature of work, and the later stages of Plato’s liberal arts curriculum.

Socrates spells out the first wave of objections in terms of his comment that guardian men and women should have everything “in common” (449a-457c). This idea rests on the principle of specialization, which was used in building the ideal city and ended up being the foundation for Socrates’s account of justice. In this context, however, it raises a puzzle. Socrates is committed to the following three claims (453b-c):

1. Each person should perform the task he or she is best suited to by nature.
2. Certain men and women should perform the task of guardian.
3. Men and women are different by nature.

How can a single person hold all three ideas at once? Once again, questions of education are driving the discussion. In this case, it is the question of whether women should share in the combination of music and athletics devised to train young men to become guardians. Wouldn’t it be ridiculous for women to strip naked and exercise alongside men?

Our knowledge of women’s athletics in antiquity is limited by the fragmentary nature of the sources.² Women did compete in athletic festivals, such as the festival of Hera, which took place at Olympia during the off years of the main Olympic celebrations, and at the all-female gymnasium dedicated to Artemis at Brauron.³ At such sites, women and girls competed in footraces, either naked or wearing knee-length tunics, and used tracks slightly shorter than the men’s. Such events likely reenacted the story of Atalanta, a mythical runner whose hand in marriage was promised to anyone who could beat her on the track (someone finally did, but only by resorting to tricks). In this story, Atalanta, like the goddesses Athena and Artemis, presents the virtues of a maiden (parthenos).⁴ The Greek term parthenos, which underlies the name of Athena’s most famous temple, refers to a period of life beginning with the onset of menstruation, when a young woman was seen as a potential bride, and ending with her eventual marriage. The Greek love of competition (agōn) is seen here as young women play hard to get by literally running away from potential suitors. The point was not to escape marriage but to weed out unworthy suitors while demonstrating independence, bravery, and discipline. It was at roughly the same period of life that young men would take on male lovers in relationships that in some ways mirrored heterosexual marriage. For young women, these rites of passage were wrapped up in religious celebrations that, like the main Olympic Games, were closed to members of the opposite sex. The exception to this gender segregation was Sparta. Building a society around military prowess, Sparta’s semi-mythical lawgiver, Lycurgus, dictated that young women should join men to compete naked in running, wrestling, discus, and javelin. This would remove softness and make them fit mothers of strong men. If Socrates’s companions are scandalized by the idea of women working out naked, the subtext is that this is a very Spartan idea. Socrates, in a bit of historical anthropology, points out that Greeks once thought it was ridiculous for men to work out naked. It was only thanks to the Spartans that the custom caught on. Once it did, the Greeks accepted that it is better to exercise stark naked, and dismissed as barbarous any foreign peoples who worked out wearing clothes.⁵

Whether or not we accept the idea that working out naked is natural, this discussion of naked exercise gives Socrates a springboard for making a bigger point: when nature and convention clash, then let go of convention, even if people laugh at you. As Socrates puts it, female guardians will “clothe themselves in virtue rather than cloaks” (457a). The implications of this are huge. Over the course of history, human beings have adopted many unnatural conventions that became so ingrained that the thought of changing them has seemed ridiculous: slavery, sexism, racism, homophobia, abuse of natural resources, and so on. People have even defended all of these as part of the natural order. Others have called for change. In time, we have come to see such unnatural conventions for what they are. In this, activists in recent times and the distant past have followed the lead of Hippocrates, who looked to social and environmental causes for disparities between different demographics, and suggested novel ways of changing the status quo.⁶ As Socrates puts it, we should never laugh at those who act “for the sake of what is good” (452d-e).⁷

When it comes to the puzzle at hand, Socrates concludes that he and his companions did not argue “according to forms/kinds” (eidos). Plato’s concept of forms will be central to the lofty theory of knowledge set out in Republic 6–7. For the moment, the point is that when talking about what people are suited to “by nature,” Socrates and his companions latched onto a superficial observation—that men impregnate women and women bear children (454d)—and they treated it as though it gave deep insight into differences relevant to questions of ruling. That is pretty much how all prejudice works: focus on the color of someone’s skin and draw conclusions about their intelligence; focus on someone’s sexual preferences and draw conclusions about their character. In this case, Socrates argues, issues of procreation are irrelevant to ruling a state. Even if women tend not to match men in bodily strength (455e), they should not be barred from leading roles in government.

To get a sense of just how progressive this suggestion is, we can look to another student of Socrates, Xenophon. In his book Oikonomikos (Household Management), Xenophon devotes chapter 7 to how a husband should train his wife. He suggests a man should find a wife when she is young and impressionable so that he can train her however he likes. In an ideal marriage, the wife is given great authority over the running of a household: overseeing the use and upkeep of property, managing the slaves, and so on. This reflects a division of responsibility: the husband works outside the home to bring wealth into the home; the wife works within the home to manage that wealth. While it was a slave economy that made all this possible, we find here a kind of equal footing between husband and wife at least. Still, according to Xenophon, the ideal bride is a blank slate. Plato, by contrast, seeks out women who are fit by nature to rule whole states, and he sets them on an educational regimen of music and athletics to help them develop their innate capacities.

The second wave of objections emerges from this education program. All the co-ed naked wrestling will eventually lead men and women to have sex (457c-471e). We cannot, however, have guardians bearing children at random. Like dog breeders and horse breeders, the ideal city will make sure it has “the best people” breeding at “the right time.” To make this happen, elaborate religious ceremonies and a carefully rigged lottery will ensure the most outstanding men will father children from as many mothers as possible. The most outstanding women will, likewise, most often be put to the task of bearing children. (The role of ritual footraces in the marriage process provides a cultural context that would make all of this sound less strange to Plato’s original readers.) These children, in turn, will be immediately taken from their parents and sent to a “rearing pen.”

The goal of all this is to make the city as unified as possible. Within the guardian class, people will refer to their elders as mother and father, and their peers as sister and brother. These will not be empty titles: given that no one knows who his or her actual parents are, there is a legitimate chance that anyone of the right age could actually be one’s parent. In the ultimate affront to ideals of private property, Socrates imagines his guardian class to be one big family. The rest of Socrates’s response details how women and children will join men on the battlefield (466e-471e), and what precautions to take to ensure children do not get killed.

It may seem that Socrates is trying to dissolve the bonds that bind a family together, but his real goal is to stretch that intimacy across the entire guardian class. Given the size of ancient Greek city-states, that might include a couple thousand people. The point of all this is to make the city as a whole as healthy as possible. That said, Socrates argues that his guardians are happier than even Olympic victors (265d-266c). While the latter get to eat for free the rest of their lives as a reward for their athletic victories (compare Socrates’s proposed “penalty” in Apology), the guardians have their whole lives taken care of as a reward for much more important victories on the battlefield and in the legislature.⁸

The third wave of objections is the most difficult to overcome: none of this will happen until philosophers are put in charge of the government. Glaucon is incredulous. Socrates’s response takes up the rest of book 5 (472a-480a) and spills over into books 6 and 7. The first step is to define what makes a philosopher. Socrates offers an analogy: just as lovers of young men are attracted to anyone in the “bloom of youth,” and wine lovers will happily drink any wine, philosophers are lovers of wisdom as a whole. Anyone who gets picky about learning, particularly when he or she is too young to see the purpose of a study, should not be considered a philosopher.

Glaucon pushes back (475d-e). By this definition, people who love to look at things and those who love to listen (philēkoos) are philosophers because they love learning through seeing and hearing.⁹ But that includes people who fill their days with frivolous things. To respond, Socrates builds on an insight from the first wave of argument. There, he criticized people for latching onto superficial observations rather than making distinctions according to forms/kinds. Knowledge, properly speaking, gets at the real nature of things: the form that ultimately explains something. People who love sights and sounds just ride along the surface. It is one thing to know what songs or paintings you like; it is another thing to understand harmonic progressions or color theory. People who merely know what they like are not, however, totally ignorant. Sounds and sights are something. Still, these people do not get at the deep principles. What are these deep principles? We will turn to that shortly. For the moment, Socrates merely carves out three categories: knowledge grasps what each thing really is; ignorance grasps nothing at all; opinion sits in between, grasping the surface features of particular objects.

While Republic 5’s three waves may look like a laundry list of complaints, the first wave’s puzzle about whether women are fit to rule “by nature” sets up the definition of knowledge that is the key to resolving Glaucon’s critique of the third wave of criticism about philosopher kings and queens. This, in turn, provides the setup for the subject of Republic’s most famous and philosophically hard-hitting passage: Plato’s cave. As we turn to this, keep in mind that Plato introduces it through the question of whether women should work out at the gym, and the implications of that for education, society, and fundamental questions about knowledge.

It has taken millennia for the world to start making real Republic’s vision of opportunities shared equally between the sexes for sports, leadership, and education. We still have a way to go. Progress was made during antiquity, though. In the Hellenistic period, as Roman power expanded and Athens became a college town with a glorious past, the Roman elite, looking to display their Greek learning, started building gyms and founding games. By this point, Plato’s works had become a pillar of the Greek canon. The same period saw an upsurge of athletic contests between girls and maidens. Women such as Thalassia of Ephesus, winner of the Sebastà Games in Naples, Italy, in 82 CE, were now publicly recognized as international champions.¹⁰ While we cannot be certain of Republic’s role in all this, the Hellenistic period represents an early stage in a process that is still unfolding today.¹¹

Educating Future Rulers: Republic 6 and 7

Republic 6 and 7 set out a series of three images: sun, line, and cave. The last of these, commonly known as Plato’s cave, is excerpted and used in high-school curricula for a range of purposes. Within Republic, these interlocking images present a systematic reflection on the nature of knowledge. What has this to do with working out naked? If we step back, we find that these three images provide Plato’s reflection on the sort of philosophical exercise Socrates pursued in dialogues set in gyms. Its account of education as a painful ordeal of being dragged into the light gives a new context for the tough-love approach Socrates advocated in Lysis. While there is much to be said about Republic’s central images, we will focus on them insofar as (a) they provide a rationale for Socrates’s activities at the gym and (b) they help us understand Republic’s main argument that justice, along with virtue in general, is a form of mental health.

The Challenge of Raising Philosophers: Republic 6 (484a-503e)

From the perspective of most twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers, there is not much of interest in this portion of Republic 6, which is mostly taken up with Socrates complaining about how philosophy is practiced in his day. But if we hold it up against Socrates’s dialogues set in gyms, certain ideas jump off the page.¹² First is the account of what kind of person is well suited to study philosophy. The pursuit of wisdom will draw students’ appetites away from other things that could lead to vice; they will thus be disciplined, brave, and just. They will have to be fast learners, with a good memory and a sense of what is musical and proportionate (485–487). In Republic 2 and 3, it was music, taught in gyms, that nurtured this sense of proportionality. In Republic 6, Socrates points out that truth is akin to what is proportionate: when you experience that lightbulb moment, you realize that everything is in its place.¹³ In this way, Republic 6 provides a rationale for the role of music in the early curriculum of Republic 2 and 3. In terms of modern developmental and positive psychology, this passage is a protracted discussion of aligning interests (what you like) with strengths (what you are good at) and developing them through practice (exploring your interests and developing your strengths). Ideally, the final stage of this process is finding purpose (aligning your strengths and interests with some need in the broader world).¹⁴

Would-be philosophers, however, are often undone by their own potential. If they happen to be well-born, good-looking, and tall like Charmides, they will likely be fawned over by all those around them. This flattery will give them impractical expectations, and make it hard for them to hear those who would point out the work they still have to do (494). As they grow older, love songs from admirers, such as Hippothales wrote for Lysis, are replaced by the praise of the mob, to which Socrates’s beloved, Alcibiades, is too attached. Athenians loved public speaking, and Socrates identifies the most dangerous threat to would-be philosophers: the sophists. These teachers of public speaking, such as Thrasymachus, learn how to please the mob, telling it whatever it wants to hear. They call that skill wisdom, and sell it to students at a great price (492–493). Young people would be better off staying out of politics through exile, disinterest, or physical illness (496).

The second thing to note about this passage is that it challenges our conceptions of what a true philosopher is. Philosophy is not something you can merely pick up as a hobby or study in college. Plato calls for a complete overhaul of society. Only in this way, he argues, can we raise people who pursue wisdom with the erotic passion described by Diotima, and demonstrate their unwavering commitment to the city that raised them (503a). It is one thing to be committed to wisdom and the city; it is another to have the wisdom to rule the state as is actually best. To become full-fledged philosopher kings and queens, promising individuals must come to understand “the form of the good” (505a).

Sun, Line, Cave: Republic 6 and 7 (504a-518b)

To spell out what this means, Socrates offers three images: sun, line, and cave. The sun was the most famous of the three in antiquity, and it sits behind images of knowledge as illumination that are found in various Western religions. Today, it is the cave that has caught people’s imaginations, inspiring movies such as The Matrix with its grand conspiracy theory. All three images present education as a process in which people are moved from shadows into the light. The sun spells out the stages of this process in a static way. The line and cave set out what it is like to move through such a process. Let us therefore start with the cave, which presents the goal of all this, and then loop back to the sun and line to fill in the details.

Socrates imagines prisoners chained in a cave since birth (Republic 7). All they have ever known are shadows on a wall. While this might seem far-fetched, our digital world with its media distortion and increasingly convincing AI artwork could rightly be seen as wrapping us in shadows and blinding us to reality. In Plato’s scheme, there are four objects of experience, each with its own type of experience; there are also transitions between them, each of which is upsetting. If a prisoner is freed, he can come to see puppets moving in front of a fire. While this is painful and disorienting, he can eventually realize that the puppets are what created the shadows and that these puppets are more real than the shadows they cast. From here, he can be dragged out of the cave and into the sunlight. For someone who has spent his whole life in a cave, this is even more disorienting. At first all he can see are reflections of things. Over time, he can look at things themselves, which are the models after which the cave’s puppets were fashioned. Eventually, he can look at the sun, the brightest thing of all. At this point, he can realize that it is the sun’s light that makes the things of the world above visible and causes their growth and nourishment.

The sun analogy (Republic 6) provides a context for the journey out of the cave. The sun we see in the sky is the source of light, which connects visible things to our sense of sight and thus makes seeing possible. This visible sun, however, ends up being an analogy for the invisible, intelligible sun, which is the form of the good. The form of the good is the ultimate source of knowledge and truth, which constitute the light by which we can understand whether any particular thing is good. If we apply this to the cave allegory, then the visible sun, which we see with our eyes, corresponds to the fire in the cave, while the intelligible sun, which we grasp with our minds, is the true sun on the surface, that is, the intelligible world. With this, we arrive at something like The Matrix: the world we have known our entire lives is not the real one. If that is the case, how do we escape?

The line offers the final piece of the puzzle. Take a line and divide it in two. On the one side are the objects we grasp with our senses; on the other side are the objects we grasp with our intellect—for instance, apples with which we learn to count versus numbers themselves. Having divided the line into two sides, divide each side into two again. On the sensible side are images of things and the sensible things themselves (pictures of apples vs. actual apples). On the intelligible side are ideas (the form of apple and numbers themselves) and insight into how all these ideas fit together in a whole that is organic and good.¹⁵ Socrates labels these four modes of grasping the world imagination, opinion, knowledge, and understanding (see table 2). According to this scheme, social media, which gives us images of things that can be sensed, is at the absolute bottom of the pile. How do we get from there to the form of the good?

Through the sun, the line, and the cave, Plato invites us to think about the world from new perspectives. Just as our teachers used apples to help us learn actual numbers, we can use actual numbers (and anything else we have real knowledge of) to learn the form of the good. The key is how we deal with hypotheses. When studying geometry, as developed by the Greeks, we lay out axioms that we do not question, and we use them to draw conclusions about other ideas and objects of sense experience. In Plato’s terms, we start at knowledge (level 3 of the line) and either move around within knowledge or use knowledge to judge opinion and imagination (levels 2 and 1). Socrates suggests that we can also turn the other way and use these same hypotheses as “stepping stones” on our way to something better: nonhypothetical understanding of the good (level 4). How to do so takes up the rest of book 7.

Let us pause for a moment to note a couple of connections. While Republic 6 and 7 present lofty ideas, the process of moving out of the cave sounds a lot like conversational wrestling with Socrates: it is painful, disorienting, and people on the outside see it as ruining students’ eyesight and “corrupting the youth” (Apology). Plato, speaking through Socrates, goes so far as to say that a person who returned from the surface to the cave would likely be killed by those living in the cave, as the historical Socrates actually was. For those who have seen the light, however, none of the things that occupy the cave dwellers’ attentions is worth taking all that seriously. This account of forms is generally agreed to be Plato’s innovation, not something he picked up from the historical Socrates. There is a question, therefore, about how far we should go in trying to fit Socrates’s activities at the gym into this framework. That said, even the Socrates character in Republic claims not to know whether any of this is true (506). If what we are dealing with are Plato’s texts, it is an open question how we are to fit the educational program of Republic 6 and 7, Symposium’s ascent to beauty, and Socrates’s aporetic debates in Laches, Lysis, Charmides, and Republic 1 into a coherent whole.

Plato’s Advanced Curriculum: Republic 7 (518b-541b)

In Republic 2 and 3, a combination of music and gym exercise prepares the soul. Given the psychological theory of Republic 4, we can now say how: gym work nurtures the spirited part of the soul, while music imparts a sense of order and wholeness, priming the soul for discipline/moderation and justice, which work together to produce psychic harmony. But these gym-bound activities merely prepare the way (521d-522b). True virtue requires wisdom to rule, and that requires understanding. In particular, it requires understanding of the form of the good. As discussion of the sun, line, and cave has shown, this is “not a matter of putting knowledge into souls that lack it … but of turning the whole soul” (518b). Socrates outlines a fifty-year curriculum for leading people out of the cave.

The early stages of this curriculum in music and gym exercise are presented as a kind of “play” (536d-537b), which children engage in freely up to age seventeen.¹⁶ Between seventeen and twenty years of age, they undertake the military training set out in Republic 5 (537b-c). Throughout, they will pick up bits of information in an unsystematic way. From twenty to thirty, they critically examine what they have learned, mostly by studying math: arithmetic, plain geometry, solid geometry, astronomy, and music theory (522c-531d). According to Plato, certain experiences can be explained simply in terms of themselves, while others “summon” us to look beyond sense experience and think in purely intellectual ways (523a-525c)—for instance, through mathematical modeling. Let us use an example from the gym to show how the earlier and later stages of this curriculum connect.

Socrates once said that makeup will make someone seem beautiful, but gym training will make him be beautiful (Plato, Gorgias 465b). As we have seen in Plato’s Charmides, the Greeks had plenty of opinions about male beauty, which were not simply “the bigger, the better.” While conventions of bodybuilding have changed over the centuries, they all make use of proportions: waist to shoulders, biceps to calves, and so on.¹⁷ Prior to any philosophical inquiry, Greek sculptors saw the human form as echoing the divine. The Greek statues that line museums, which are mostly Roman copies in marble of Greek originals in bronze, still take our breath away. Such statues embody ratios that we find in musical instruments in the relative lengths of pipes or strings. The same can be said for Greek architecture, much of which is based on the golden ratio, which can also be found everywhere from ferns and conch shells to spiral galaxies.

In short, music, geometry, and the other mathematical sciences allow us to understand experiences that students encountered in the early curriculum through play.¹⁸ The point here is that human beings instinctively find numerical ratios beautiful, whether they are heard or seen. These same ratios structure elements of the natural world that are as disparate as the sound of a string, the curve of a conch shell, and the shape of a human body. In Plato’s curriculum, philosophers spend their twenties figuring out the mathematical models behind everyday experience. The goal is to study each branch to its completion. Here the sense of order instilled by one’s early education takes center stage. The real philosophers will not stop until they have that final lightbulb moment described by Diotima in Symposium, as they track each field to its basic principles.

That, however, is merely “prelude” (531d). Philosophers will spend their next five years, age thirty to thirty-five, studying pure dialectic. Through it, they leave the senses behind entirely and figure out how the basic principles they found in these different fields all fit together in a single, overarching system. In today’s terms, this would be a grand unified theory. In Plato’s terms, it is the vision of the form of the good. What does such a vision entail? To answer this, we would need to move beyond images and think via pure thought. Socrates tells his companions he can take them no further and ends this part of the discussion by merely pointing the way.

The true philosophers, having made it to this vision of the good, will then go back into the cave to work as soldiers for the next fifteen years, from age thirty-five to fifty. At this point, they will find out whether they can apply their learning to politics without compromising their principles. Those who succeed will become philosopher kings and queens. Unlike most rulers, they will approach ruling as a burden by comparison to the delights of philosophy, yet one that they must shoulder for the sake of the city that raised them.¹⁹ While the masses will be left to chase shadows, people with a sense of how the world actually works will keep the masses in line as best they can. Having an army at their disposal will help. The goal is for the city as a whole to flourish.²⁰

The Method of Hypothesis in Republic 1–7

Republic’s exploration of justice hangs on the philosopher’s understanding of the form of the good, yet it is this key detail that Socrates says he cannot explain. What should we make of this gaping hole at the heart of Republic’s argument? In chapters 7 and 8, I argued that Symposium is structured by Plato’s method of hypothesis. This method proceeds as investigators keep identifying the question behind the question, until they arrive at a most basic question. The result is a string of hypotheses that eventually ends at a nonhypothetical first principle. At this point, they move into confirming (a) that all of these hypotheses in fact follow from the first principle, and (b) the truth of the first principle itself. We find the same process at work in Republic.²¹ In Republic 1, Socrates sets out the initial hypothesis, that justice is profitable, which in Republic 2 he refines to justice is profitable in itself. To explain why, Socrates sets out an account of justice for the city and for the individual (Republic 2–4). Book 4’s accounts of both civic and personal justice turn on the rule of wisdom, raising the further question, What is wisdom? Republic 5 refines the question, as the three waves of objections, following from the account of civic justice, clarify the need to grasp forms, and raise the new question: Knowledge of which form constitutes wisdom? Republic 6 and 7 answers: knowledge of the form of the good. This raises the final question: What is the form of the good? To answer, Socrates lays out his fifty-year curriculum. At this point, we might undertake his fifty-year course of study and see what it gets us. If all goes according to Socrates’s plan, the result will be an understanding of a nonhypothetical first principle grounded in the basic structure of reality.²² Alternatively, we could treat Socrates’s account of the good as a hypothesis and confirm how well it answers all the questions that came before. Given this curriculum’s emphasis on mathematics and concepts of balance borrowed from medicine and music, we can assume that the form of the good is somehow related to ideas of harmony, and the bringing together of disparate parts into balanced, organic wholes. By critically applying this idea to the questions raised since book 1, we can come to a provisional/hypothetical answer to Thrasymachus’s initial question, Is justice profitable? This is Socrates’s main task for Republic’s remaining three books.²³