Summary: Republic (page 3)

We must strive for unity so that the city acts as one. Just as a blow to the finger is felt throughout the whole body, the ideal is that when any good or evil befalls a citizen, the entire city shares in his joy or sorrow ¹.

The community of property has another advantage, particularly welcome in an age of sycophants—professional informers who made their living by bringing lawsuits against individuals: the number of legal disputes will fall sharply if each person possesses nothing but his own body ².

Plato returns to the question of the right constitution: monarchy, as he previously argued. But who is the man to whom power should be entrusted? It is the philosopher:

As long as philosophers are not kings in the cities, or as long as those we now call kings and sovereigns are not truly and seriously philosophers; as long as political power and philosophy do not meet in the same person, there will be no end […] to the evils of the cities nor to those of the human race, and never will the city we have described see the light of day ³.

Plato distinguishes between two types of men: the man of practice and the philosopher: To the one, it is proper by nature to engage in philosophy and to govern in the city; to the other, not to engage in philosophy, but to obey the ruler ⁴.

Practical men love spectacles and the arts; their curiosity is wholly a matter of eyes and ears, leaving them trapped in mere opinion. They admire beautiful voices, striking colours, and elegant forms, yet their intelligence is incapable of perceiving and loving the essence of beauty itself ⁵. The philosopher, by contrast, attains true knowledge and is able to ascend to beauty itself, perceiving it in its purest form ⁶.

To sharpen this distinction, Plato refines, in this passage of The Republic, the contrast between opinion and knowledge.

Things are distinguished by their mode of being. Now, what fully is can be fully known, and what is not at all cannot be known in any way ⁷. In between lie things that both are and are not—a middle ground between what absolutely is and what is not at all. These are grasped by something intermediate between knowledge and ignorance: opinion.

If the object of knowledge is what truly is, then the object of opinion is mere appearance—neither knowledge nor ignorance.

The object of opinion is the multitude of beautiful things. Plato calls the man of opinion a philodox.

Book VI

Plato thus draws a line between two types of men: the philosopher and the philodox:

Those who can attain knowledge of the unchangeable are philosophers, while those who cannot, but wander in the multiplicity of changing objects, are not philosophers ⁸.

We must therefore return to the question raised in the previous book of The Republic: which of them should rule the city?

In other words, since the Guardians are those who must watch over the laws and institutions, which should we choose as rulers?

To ask the question is to answer it. Should the guardianship of anything be entrusted to a blind man or to one who can see? The answer is plain: the philosopher is the one who sees clearly and must hold power. For in what way do they differ, in your opinion, from the blind—those who, deprived of knowledge of the true being of each thing, cannot turn their gaze towards absolute truth and, after contemplating it with the utmost attention, use it as a reference to establish here below the laws of the beautiful, the just, and the good? ⁹.

¹ Ibid.
² 464d, 465c
³ 473a-474a
⁴ 474a-475a
⁵ 476a-476e
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ 476e-477d
⁸ 484a-484d
⁹ Ibid.