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Book X

Book X opens with a reference to the metaphor of vision. It was just such a metaphor Socrates used way back in Book II to shift the discussion from what justice was in an individual to what it was in a city. They had made repeated attempts at defining justice in an individual, but each attempt had ultimately failed. “It looks to me,” said Socrates, “as though the investigation we are undertaking is no ordinary thing, but one for a man who sees sharply.” It would appear, however, that none of them is such a man. They can’t make out the image of justice when it is writ small, so to speak, in an individual, so Socrates suggests that perhaps “the same letters are somewhere else also, but bigger and in a bigger place, I suppose it would be a godsend,” he observes, “to be able to consider the littler ones after having read these first, if, of course, they do happen to be the same” (368d 4-7).. Emphasis added.

So they turn from the issue of what justice is in an individual to what it is in a city.

The discussion at the beginning of Book X returns to the issue of censorship of the arts. Socrates suggests that imitative arts may have a particularly deleterious effect on the citizens in the city they so carefully constructed. Yet he professes not to understand what imitation actually is and suggests that Glaucon explain it to him. When Glaucon says, in effect, that if Socrates can’t do it, then he, Glaucon, cannot be expected to be able to do it, Socrates responds that it would not be at all strange if Glaucon could do it “since men with duller vision have often, you know, seen things before those who see more sharply” (596a 1-2).

So there we are, back to vision as a metaphor for understanding. It’s possible, of course, that Glaucon won’t be able to explain what imitation is, just as none in that small company was able to discern whether justice in a city was the same thing as justice in an individual. It is also possible, however, that Socrates is serious when he asserts that those with “duller vision” can often see things that those with sharper “eyesight” cannot. An earlier dialog, the Meno, whose subject is virtue and whether it can be taught, ends with Socrates asserting that virtue would appear to be a gift of the gods rather than something passed on through instruction, so perhaps he thinks that sharpness of “vision,” which we can take here to mean sharpness of wit, or cleverness, doesn’t really have all that much to do with understanding what is essential to understanding that which one needs to understand to live well and justly.

Socrates professes not to like the imitative arts because there is something duplicitous about them. They confuse those they entertain. Tragedies and epic poems stir up immoderate passions that can wreak havoc in the lives of spectators. Painting fools the eye and in effect tells the brain that the same thing, a bowl for example, is both round and elliptical because its known shape conflicts with its depicted shape. Happiness is to be found, asserts Socrates in anticipation of what Aristotle will say later in the Nicomachean Ethics, in a life of moderation and reason.

It’s hard to believe that Plato would actually have supported such extreme forms of censorship, and yet, there is something profoundly insightful in his observation that entertainment can affect people negatively. Most people today believe that. We don’t like the idea of children being exposed to too much violence on television, in the movies, in video games. We aren’t sure just how the depiction of violence works on the minds of viewers, but we have a strong suspicion that it is not good.

I feel the same way, actually, about shows whose purpose appears to be making entertainment of people’s public humiliation, shows such as “Cheaters” that depict people spying on their spouses trying to catch them “cheating” and then sticking the camera in the faces of all the relevant parties when such cheating has been exposed. People yell, they scream things we know they’ll later regret. They behave in ways that most of us have been taught to think of as shameful. When I was a child, I was taught to look away from the spectacle of people debasing themselves. Now we’re making television programs out of such spectacles. Isn’t there something wrong with this? Aren’t we all diminished by it? Isn’t humanity diminished by it?

It isn’t easy to live justly and well. Don’t we need examples of the heights of human achievement in both a technical and, more importantly, a moral sense to encourage us to strive to realize our positive potential? It seems to me we used to have a better grasp of this than we do now. A television or radio station couldn’t get an FCC license unless it dedicated a certain amount of time to programming in the public interest. Television programs used to be like little morality plays where an important lesson was taught in an entertaining way. On of my favorite example of this is an episode of “Father Knows Best,” a situation comedy that ran from 1949-1954. Jim Anderson, the “father” of the title is offered a great deal on a mink coat that had been ordered for someone who failed to pick it up. His wife adores the coat, but is made increasingly uneasy by the gradual changes it brings about in her life. Her friends are envious and suddenly feel shabby beside her. She’s invited to join a snobbish club by a group of women with whom she had never socialized before and whom she suspects would not have asked her had it not been for the coat. Finally, after some soul searching, she tells her husband she wants him to take it back. She doesn’t want her friends to feel inferior and she doesn’t want to socialize with snobs who care more about a person’s clothes than about her character.

I love that episode because it makes very clear that a person’s character is more important than his or her possessions, that it is wrong to do things that make others feel small, even if only inadvertently, that it is in fact impossible to be truly happy if those around you are not also happy and if you are not accepted by them for who you really are rather than who you appear to be. Almost every show from that period in television history had some sort of positive message. Many of them will seem trite now, but if they do, the fault is in a lack of artistry on the part of the writers rather than in the essence of the message.

Plato was right, virtue is the only path to happiness. That’s the point of the famous “myth of Er.” Er is a man who, Socrates explains, was killed in a war. He came back to life, however, as he was about to be burned on a funeral pyre and related a fantastical tale of what he had experienced for that brief period when he’d been dead. It’s a tale of reincarnation where the dead, as well as those who have not yet been born, are allowed to choose the form their next life will take. They may come back as any sort of animal or human, wealthy or poor, ruler or ruled, public or private citizen, etc., etc. And, of course, people lacking in wisdom choose badly.

“[E]ach of us must,” asserts Socrates,

above all see to it that he is a seeker and student of that study by which he might be able to learn and find out who will give him the capacity and the knowledge to distinguish the good and the bad life … Thus he may know the effects, bad and good, of beauty mixed with poverty or wealth and accompanied by this or that habit of soul; and the effects of any particular mixture with one another of good and bad birth, private station and ruling office, strength and weakness, facility and difficulty in learning, and all such things that are connected with a soul by nature or are acquired. From all this he will be able to draw a conclusion and choose—in looking off toward the nature of the soul—between the worse and the better life, calling worse the one that leads it toward becoming more unjust, and better the one that leads it to becoming juster. He will let everything else go. For we have seen that this is the most important choice for him in life and death. … For in this way a human being becomes happiest. (618b 9-619a 7.)

It seems to me, that that is what the Republic is really about. That is, none of use can have so much first-hand experience that we will know from this experience everything we need to know to live a happy life. We must “study” life and in that way, we come to “know the effects, bad and good, “ of the different shapes lives can take, and hence be able to chose between the worse and the better life. That is, Plato is giving us these shapes in his meandering tale of a conversation Socrates once had with some nearsighted friends about justice.