Important Quotations Explained
1. The result, then,
is that more plentiful and better-quality goods are more easily
produced if each person does one thing for which he is naturally
suited, does it at the right time, and is released from having to
do any of the others.
In Book II, Socrates introduces the
principle of specialization. According to Plato, political justice
boils down to this guiding rule—that everyone do that to which their
nature best suits them, and not meddle in any other business. Producers
must produce according to their natures (e.g., the farmer farms,
the carpenter builds wooden objects, the artist paints, and the
doctor heals); warriors must fight; and the philosophers must rule.
2. What about someone
who believes in beautiful things but doesn’t believe in the beautiful
itself and isn’t able to follow anyone who could lead him to the
knowledge of it? Don’t you think he is living in a dream rather
than a wakened state? Isn’t this dreaming: whether asleep or awake,
to think that a likeness is not a likeness but rather the thing
itself that it is like?
In Book V, Socrates explains what distinguishes
the lover of sights and sounds, the pseudo-intellectual, from the
true philosopher. The lover of sights and sounds takes the sensible
objects around him for the most real things, not recognizing that
there is a higher level of reality in the intelligible realm. In
particular, he goes around talking about beauty, billing himself
as an expert on beauty, and yet he does not even realize that there
is such a thing as the Form of the Beautiful, which is the cause
of all sensible beauty.
3. They don’t
understand that a true captain must pay attention to the seasons
of the year, the sky, the stars, the winds, and all that pertains
to his craft, if he’s really to be the ruler of a ship. And they
don’t believe that there is any craft that would enable him to determine
how he should steer the ship, whether the others want him to or
not, or any possibility of mastering this alleged craft or of practicing
it at the same time as the craft of navigation. Don’t you think that
the true captain will be called a real stargazer, a babbler, and
a good-for-nothing by those who sail in ships governed in that way?
After Socrates presents his notion of
a philosopher-king in Book VI, Adeimantus objects by pointing out
that all real-life philosophers are either vicious or useless.
Socrates responds by drawing an analogy to a ship governed by violent
men, ignorant of navigation. His intention is to demonstrate that
a good philosopher would necessarily be considered useless under
current circumstances. True knowledge is not valued in modern Athens,
nor even believed possible, and so anyone who tries to live their
life by pursuing and praising real knowledge (as the true philosopher
must do) will be thought a useless fool.
4. Once one has
seen it, however, one must conclude that it is the cause of all
that is correct and beautiful in anything, that it produces both
light and its source in the visible realm, and that in the intelligible
realm it controls and provides truth and understanding, so that
anyone who is to act sensibly in private or public must see it.
Socrates describes the Form of the Good
in Book VI, the ultimate object of knowledge. The Form of the Good
is the source of all other Forms—the source of the entire intelligible
realm, of intelligibility itself, and of our cognitive capacity
to know. Though Socrates is not able to describe the Form of the
Good explicitly, he attempts to give us a sense of it by comparing
it to the sun. It is only when a man grasps the Form of the Good
that he achieves the highest level of cognition, understanding.
When a guardian takes this last step he is finally ready to become
a philosopher-king.
5. Under
the tyranny of erotic love he has permanently become while awake
what he used to become occasionally while asleep.
In Book IX, Socrates presents a long
and psychologically astute portrait of the tyrannical man. The tyrannical
man is governed by lawless desires, the sort of desires that in
normal people only emerge occasionally in dreams (desires for illicit
sexual unions or heinous murders). Leading him down this nightmarish
path, and egging him constantly on to greater excess, is the tyrannical
man’s erotic lusts. Socrates deems erotic love the greatest tyrant
of all, and regards it as a dangerous emotion, best avoided by good
men.
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