The Three Waves (Book V)

I was about to describe the four bad constitutions, when Polemarchus, who was sitting a little apart from Adeimantus, stretched out his hand and took hold of his cloak, and whispered something in his ear. "Shall we let it pass?" I heard Adeimantus say. "Certainly not," he answered aloud.

"What are you not letting pass?" I asked.

"You," said Adeimantus. "You think you can steal a whole section of the argument. You said in passing that, among friends, women and children would be held in common, as if everyone would see at once what that meant. Tell us how."

I hesitated, for I saw a swarm of arguments rising. I said it was like facing three great waves, each bigger than the last.

The first wave is this: should women guardians do the same work as men? We use female dogs to guard and to hunt as well as male, not just to bear and rear puppies. If we use women for the same work, we must give them the same education, music and gymnastics and the art of war. People will laugh, especially at the idea of women exercising naked in the gymnasium alongside the men, and old women too. But it is not long since the Greeks thought it shameful and laughable for men to be seen naked, as most barbarians still do; and when the Cretans and then the Spartans began it, the wits of the time made fun of them too. The question is not what is customary, but what is natural. Men and women differ in that women bear and men beget; but that has nothing to do with whether they can guard a city. There is no work in the city that belongs to a woman as woman or to a man as man; natural gifts are distributed alike among both, though women are on the whole somewhat weaker. A woman can be fit to be a doctor, a musician, a soldier or a philosopher. So women with guardian natures shall share in guarding the city, and their education shall be the same.

The second wave is greater. These women shall all be common to all these men; none shall live privately with any man; and their children shall be common, so that no parent shall know his own child, nor any child his parent.

To produce the best offspring, I said, we shall do as breeders do with dogs and horses: mate the best with the best as often as possible, and the worst with the worst as seldom as possible. The rulers will arrange festivals, with sacrifices and hymns, at which brides and bridegrooms will be brought together. They will be paired by a lottery, cleverly rigged by the rulers, so that the inferior will blame chance and not the rulers. The young men who distinguish themselves in war will be given more frequent permission to sleep with the women. The children will be taken to nurses in a separate part of the city; the mothers will come to nurse them, but care will be taken that no mother recognizes her own child.

The greatest good for a city, I said, is what binds it together and makes it one, and the greatest evil is what tears it apart and makes it many. When all the citizens rejoice and grieve at the same things, the city is one. And the city is most like a single man: when a finger is hurt, the whole body feels the pain, and we say "the man has a pain in his finger." In our city, all the guardians will say "mine" of the same things. Every man of the right age will be called father by the young, every woman mother, every contemporary brother or sister. They will have no private possessions to quarrel over, no private families to prefer; lawsuits and quarrels will vanish from among them.

And in war, I said, our soldiers will take their children with them, on horseback, to watch from a safe distance and learn their future trade, as the children of potters watch their fathers at the wheel. And they will treat other Greeks as kin: when Greeks fight Greeks, it is not war but civil strife, a sickness of Greece; they will not enslave Greeks, nor ravage Greek land, nor burn Greek houses, but make war in the expectation of making peace.

"But Socrates," Glaucon said, "you keep avoiding the main question: is such a city possible, and how?"

You have no mercy on me, I said, now that I have escaped two waves and you bring on the third and greatest. Yet I will say it, even if it drowns me in laughter and contempt.

Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils, nor, I believe, will the human race.

"Socrates," said Glaucon, "say that, and a great many people, and important ones too, will tear off their coats, grab whatever weapon is nearest, and come running at you to do you harm."

Then we must explain, I said, who the philosophers are. A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of one part of it but of all. "But many people love to see and hear everything," Glaucon said, "and run around to every festival. Are they philosophers?" No; they are lovers of sights and sounds. They delight in beautiful voices, colors and shapes, but their minds cannot see or delight in the nature of beauty itself. The philosopher loves the sight of truth.

The man who believes in beautiful things but not in beauty itself, I said, is living in a dream. For to dream is to take a likeness for the thing itself. The man who knows beauty itself is awake. His state of mind is knowledge; the other's is opinion. Knowledge is of what is; ignorance is of what is not; and opinion lies between the two, set over the things that wander between being and not being: the many beautiful things that also appear ugly, the many just things that also appear unjust. Those who see the many beautiful things but not beauty itself have opinion, not knowledge. Those who love what is, we must call philosophers.

(End of Episode 5 — continued in Episode 6: The Ship and the Sun)