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Daily · Philosophy

The Republic

Plato, translated by Benjamin Jowett · philosophical dialogue, c. 375 BCE·16 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
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  • It starts because a servant grabs Socrates by the cloak. On his way home from a festival at Piraeus, Polemarchus sends a servant to physically stop him: "Polemarchus desires you to wait." A house full of friends refuses to let him leave for the night, and that refusal becomes the frame for the entire dialogue.
  • Thrasymachus says justice is just the interest of the stronger. He compares rulers to shepherds who fatten sheep for their own dinner, not the flock's benefit, and calls tyranny "the consummation of injustice," since a crime large enough gets the criminal called happy and blessed instead of a thief.
  • Glaucon's ring of Gyges tests justice against total invisibility. A shepherd named Gyges finds a ring in a chasm, turns the collet inward, vanishes, then uses the power to seduce the queen, murder the king, and take the throne of Lydia. Glaucon dares Socrates to prove justice still wins even with that ring on.
  • Socrates proposes a magnificent lie about gold and silver souls. Citizens would be told their souls were forged underground from gold, silver, brass, or iron before birth, fixing their rank in the city for life. Socrates introduces the scheme by admitting he is ashamed even to propose such a fiction.
  • The cave allegory turns shadows into the whole of reality. Prisoners are chained facing a wall from childhood, watching shadows cast by a fire and mistaking them for the entire world. One is dragged out into the sun, and Socrates warns the others would kill him if he tried to drag them out too.
  • The Myth of Er ends the book with souls picking lives. The soul that grabs the richest lot picks a tyranny before thinking it through, then weeps on realizing he is fated to eat his own children. Odysseus, choosing last, is delighted to find one ordinary life everyone else had ignored.
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it invents the noble lie, the cave, and the ring of Gyges in one sitting, three thought experiments still doing the argumentative work of modern politics, ethics, and media theory.

Socrates gets stopped on his way home from a festival and ends up building an entire imaginary city just to answer one question: is it better to be just or to get away with being unjust.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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