The Ship and the Sun (Book VI)

If, then, philosophers are those who can grasp what is always the same, and the others wander among the many and changing things, which of them should be the guardians of a city? Clearly, those who know what each thing truly is, and who also are not inferior to the others in experience or in any part of virtue.

The philosophic nature, I said, loves learning that reveals the eternal; it loves the whole of truth and hates falsehood. Its desires flow toward the pleasures of the soul and away from those of the body, so it is moderate and not a lover of money. It is not petty; for a mind that contemplates all time and all being will not think human life a great thing, nor fear death. It is just and gentle, quick to learn, with a good memory, graceful and well proportioned. Such natures, matured by education and age, are the ones to whom we would entrust the city.

Here Adeimantus objected. "Nobody can answer you, Socrates, when you argue like this, step by step, like a skilled draughts player who corners his opponent. But look at the facts. Those who take up philosophy, not just as part of their education when young, but who stay in it too long, become, most of them, very strange, not to say completely vicious; and even the best of them are made useless to the city."

I answered with a parable. Imagine, I said, a ship. The shipowner is bigger and stronger than anyone on board, but a little deaf and short-sighted, and his knowledge of navigation is no better. The sailors are quarreling with each other about who should steer, each thinking he ought to, though he has never learned the art and cannot name his teacher; indeed, they say it cannot be taught, and they are ready to cut to pieces anyone who says it can. They crowd around the owner, begging and pressing him to give them the helm; and if others persuade him instead, they kill them or throw them overboard. Then, having drugged or made the noble owner drunk, they take command of the ship, help themselves to the stores, and sail on, drinking and feasting, as you would expect. They praise as a navigator whoever helps them get control, and call useless anyone who does not. They have no idea that the true navigator must study the seasons, the sky, the stars and the winds. And so, on such a ship, the true navigator would be called a stargazer, a babbler, a good-for-nothing.

That is how our cities treat the true philosophers. If they are useless, blame not them, but those who do not use them. It is not natural for the navigator to beg the sailors to be ruled by him.

As for the vicious ones, the best natures are corrupted most. Just as the strongest seed, planted in the wrong soil, grows into the worst weed, so the most gifted souls, badly raised, become the worst criminals. And what corrupts them most is not the sophists, who are blamed, but the public itself: when the crowd sits together in the assembly, the law courts, the theaters, and roars its approval and disapproval, with the rocks echoing the noise, what young man's heart would not be swept away? And the sophists themselves, the paid teachers, teach nothing but the opinions of the crowd. They are like a man who keeps a great and strong beast, and learns its moods and desires, how to approach it and when it is gentle or savage, and calls this knowledge wisdom, and teaches it, calling good what pleases the beast and bad what angers it.

So only a very small remnant of true philosophers remains: some noble exile, or a great soul born in a small city who despises its politics, or one held back by ill health, like our friend Theages, whom sickness kept away from politics. My own case, the divine sign that holds me back, is hardly worth mentioning. Such a man, seeing the madness of the many, keeps quiet and minds his own business, like a man who stands behind a wall in a storm of dust and rain, content if he can live his life free from injustice and wicked deeds, and depart in peace.

And yet it is not impossible that philosophers might come to rule, or rulers might be inspired with a true love of philosophy; and the many are not so harsh, if they are not provoked, but shown gently what a philosopher is.

Then we came to the greatest study of all. Beyond justice and the other virtues, the guardian must know the form of the Good, by which just things and all the rest become useful and beneficial. Without it, all other knowledge is of no use, any more than possessions are of use without the good.

"But what is the Good?" Glaucon asked. "Is it knowledge, or pleasure, or something else?"

I am afraid it is beyond me, I said. But I will tell you about its offspring, which is most like it. Consider sight. Of all the senses, sight needs something more than the eye and the object: it needs light. And the source of light is the sun. The eye is not the sun, but it is the most sunlike of the sense organs. So the sun is the child of the Good, and what the Good is in the realm of thought, in relation to mind and the things known, the sun is in the visible realm, in relation to sight and the things seen. When the eyes are turned to things lit by daylight, they see clearly; when they are turned to things in the twilight of night, they are dim and almost blind. So with the soul: when it is fixed on what truth and being illuminate, it knows and understands; when it turns to what is mixed with darkness, to what comes into being and passes away, it has only opinion, and seems to have no mind.

And just as the sun gives visible things not only their visibility but also their generation, growth and nourishment, though it is not itself generation, so the Good gives the things known not only their being known, but their very being, though the Good is not being, but beyond being in dignity and power.

"Heavenly Apollo!" said Glaucon, laughing. "What a marvel of transcendence!"

Then picture a line divided into two unequal parts, I said, one for the visible and one for the intelligible, and divide each part again in the same ratio. In the visible section, the lower part is images: shadows, reflections in water and in polished surfaces. The upper part is the things themselves of which these are images: animals, plants, all made things. In the intelligible section, the lower part is the realm of the mathematician, who uses visible figures as images, and reasons from assumptions down to conclusions, not up to a first principle. The upper part is the realm of dialectic, which treats its assumptions not as first principles but as stepping stones, rising to the unhypothetical first principle of everything, and then descends again, using only forms, never anything visible. To these four parts correspond four states of the soul: imagination, belief, thought and understanding, each having as much clarity as its objects have truth.

(End of Episode 6 — continued in Episode 7: The Cave)