Prompted by a reading of Books II, III, VII and VIII, in this brief essay we will consider education as the systematic upbringing of boys, which divides into early poetic and musical education, a more advanced study based on numbers, which teaches the soul to turn its sight upwards to beings, and finally, for the most talented boys in the city, the potentially dangerous dialectic.
The education of boys is one of the basic building blocks of the constitution of the city. This holds for aristocracy too, as the best of all the constitutions of the city. The causal pattern from which we start is roughly the following. The whole dialogue in Book VIII of the Republic follows on from the previously defined tripartite structure of the soul (437b–441c) and describes how the decline of virtue in men and the subsequent degeneration of the city are caused by the curtailing of the power of the rational part of the soul (λογιστικόν) and the replacement of its dominance by one of the lower parts of the soul, that is, by spirit (θυμός) or by appetite (ἐπιθυμητικόν). As is well known, Socrates introduces a taxonomy of deficient constitutions of cities according to which parts of the soul are more active in the given members of the city; from the ideal aristocracy is born timocracy, from that oligarchy, then follows democracy and finally tyranny. As is pointed out in (THEIN, 2014), the relationship between human nature (the distribution of influence among the parts of the soul) and the order of the city is not a mere correspondence; rather, the relationship is causal and one-directional: “the nature of the rulers directly determines the nature of the corresponding constitution of the city” (THEIN, 2014, p. 240; 544d-e).
Our aim here is not a detailed description of the causes and the course of the declines from one constitution to another. To highlight the causal role of education, however, we will point to two things: first, what kind of education is necessary for the development and preservation of aristocracy; and second, what must change, and not only in education, for the first degeneration towards timocracy to take place.
In the seventh book we find a kind of culmination of the systematisation of the educational programme for young men who are to be brought up as guardians, and then as philosopher-rulers. Already from the allegory of the cave we see that the beginning of the philosopher’s path is a turn from the shadow towards the light and the knowledge of the Idea of the Good. The task of education is not to put “sight into blind eyes”, but rather to turn the whole body and soul away from lowly and changeable things upwards to the “things of truth”, the unchanging Ideas, and above all the Idea of the Good (518b–519a). Such a path of turning the sight of the soul requires several stages of education. At the beginning, one must study gymnastics and the art of music, which develop “harmony” and “concord” (521d–522b). Then Socrates recommends several mathematically based disciplines (the study of number, mensuration, geometry, the study of the stars, astronomy, harmonics), which raise the sight of the soul upwards (on condition that astronomy is cultivated properly, for according to Socrates it can, on the contrary, turn the sight of the soul downwards, towards matter). Only those who persevere, succeed in the preceding subjects and reach the age of thirty may move on to the highest of all the arts, that is, to dialectic. (537d)
Dialectic draws the sight of the soul upwards out of the barbaric mire, also by making use of the knowledge of the preceding fields (533d). Socrates warns that boys may misuse the dialectical art as a toy, indulging in idle refutation of proofs and in criticism of everything they hear. Boys who are too young and unsteady would bark “like puppies” and snap at everything. That is why boys must learn dialectic at an age when they are steady, already have some knowledge, and will not, through their constant refutation of everything they hear, slide into a kind of relativism in which they cease to honour their fathers’ original principles and the laws of the lawgivers. (VII, 538c–539d).
After five years of systematic training in dialectic, which is regarded as the summit of the “system of studies” (534e), the philosopher so equipped is the one who:
“[…] in each thing grasps the reasoned sense of its being […] And of him who cannot do this, you will say that he has no rational knowledge of that thing, precisely because he is not able to make that sense clear to himself and to another […]” (534b–c, emphasis mine)
Socrates mentions several further traits of character that the ruling philosopher must meet. Among them, for example, is that the philosopher-ruler is to be unwilling to rule. He takes up rule only because he realises that there is no one better in the city. Or he wants to prevent “the realisation of worse forms of rule” (THEIN, 2014, p. 204).
It must be added that the whole as yet non-existent educational system, which is to prepare the future guardians-philosophers-rulers, contains many cuts and much censorship, so that the content taught in the individual fields does not corrupt the boys from an early age. In Book III, for example, we find a whole series of commands on how the gods are to be portrayed in poetry; what exactly poetry is to strengthen in the boys and, conversely, which passages and themes are forbidden: the boys must not hear myths that portray the gods as evil; poetry is to strengthen courage, whereas the excessive pathos of laments is forbidden. Furthermore, through poetry the guardians must not put themselves into roles that could spoil their character: slaves, women, drunkards and the like. (386a–392c)
What is such a strict form of education supposed to lead to? As has already been mentioned, not only in Book VIII of the Republic do we follow the causal relationship between the content and the (tripartite) structure of the soul of individual persons and the style of the constitution by which the given city is governed. If, then, there is a causal relationship Soul => Constitution of the city, we can add that it is precisely education that forms the soul, and therefore the causal relationship could look as follows:
Education => Soul => Constitution.
Philosophers, as the best of all the guardians, for they have undergone the education in dialectic thanks to which their soul is able to behold Beings and above all the Idea of the Good, will be unwilling yet benevolent stewards of the city. Such a city then continues in its existence and prospers if: “proper upbringing and education is maintained, it brings it about that capable individuals arise in the city, and good individuals in turn, acquiring such upbringing, become even better than those before them, both in other things and as regards begetting, just as is the case with the other living creatures” (VI, 424a–c). The stewards in the city are entrusted with teaching the young boys. If well and properly educated stewards teach the future generation, and everything else remains in order, Socrates expects future generations to be more refined than the previous ones. Such a “eugenic effect” on the human resources of the city is meant to ensure that an abundance of excellent, virtuous men, governed by the rational component of the soul, will guarantee the stability of the aristocratic constitution of the city. Socrates warns, however, that any change in the structure of education can change the structures of the constitution of the city and its laws, which is why the stewards of the city must avoid any innovations in the teaching of gymnastics and the art of music, so that it is not corrupted: “for nowhere are the laws of music disturbed without the greatest political laws being disturbed at the same time, as Damon says, and I believe him” (VI, 424c)
If everything works as Socrates urges, and the stewards apply the educational practices in a suitable way to the teaching of new generations, it seems that these two elements support each other cyclically, and there is no reason to fear decline. Yet at the beginning of Book VIII Socrates borrows the voice of the Muses, through whom he explains the cause of the first decline of aristocracy and the beginning of the shift to timocracy. The Muses claim that everything that has come into being is sooner or later destined for destruction. Specifically, in the case of the stewards of the perfect city, the blame lies with an improper begetting of offspring. The Muses claim that there exists a geometrical number, calculable by complex mathematics, with which one can predict when children should be born to the stewards (VIII, 546a–547a). Thus less talented offspring will be born, in whom another part of the soul becomes more dominant, and who, moreover, will neglect education, first in the art of music, then in gymnastics too. This will produce inequality and irregularity, which will lead to discord and to the beginning of the transformation towards the timocratic constitution. The timocratic constitution is marked by the suppression of the influence of the rational part of the soul, and in its place comes the influence of the spirited (θυμός) part of the soul, above all the qualities of “contentiousness and ambition” (548c). While the father of the timocratic man is still governed by the rational side of the soul, his passivity towards the family’s financial debtors and his unwillingness to take part in the public life of the city lead the mother and the servants to complain about the father in front of the son, accusing the father of a lack of manliness and of the ability to act. All this shows in a shift in the soul of the timocratic son, who begins to value honour and money above the good and reason. Such a timocratic soul pushes the importance of traditional aristocratic education into the background. He is still a lover of the art of music and of rhetoric, but the timocratic man no longer has a sufficiently developed talent to be active in music himself or to be a good speaker. His relationship to aristocratic education is a mere shadow; perhaps he understands its importance, but he no longer participates in it, nor can he. On the contrary, he is a lover of rule, of bodily exercise and of deeds of war. (VIII, 549a)
Aristocratic society assumed that its stewards would have the active skill to devote themselves to rigorous training, not only for the good of the individual souls of the steward-philosophers; rather, we may assume that dialectical teaching and its cultivation had an influence on the knowledge of the wider society of the city. As was said above, the rational knowledge of the steward-philosophers presupposes that they are able to explain the sense of beings to themselves and to another. The dialectical method, not unlike the Socratic dialogues themselves, is a purifying element, above all of an orally based society, in which all communication and the public transfer of information is passed on through the active form of spoken communication. Those who practised dialectic in the aristocratic city not only purified their own reason; it is also likely that the whole city benefited from the fact that the thoughts of the majority in the city could potentially be tested and purified. If dialectic was the culmination of the educational methods for turning the soul from the shadow of sense impressions upwards towards beings and above all the Idea of the Good, the loss of its influence in timocratic society must lead to society gradually taking more interest in lowly, sensory things. For fewer and fewer people in timocratic society are able and willing to go back down into the imaginary cave and expose themselves to social ostracism and physical danger only for the sake of a knowledge that their soul possesses but that no one is prepared to listen to.
On the basis of an examination of several selected passages of Plato’s dialogue the Republic, we can say that the triggering mechanism of the decline of the ideal constitution of the city is neither a lack of education nor an inherent disposition of the human soul. The cause seems to be a mechanism that goes beyond the city itself: a peculiar geometrical number which, by all appearances, determines the right time for begetting children. An ironic fact also seems to be that Socrates in the dialogue knows this number. If that is so, it means that humankind is not condemned to a continual degradation of the constitutions of cities. The open question, however, is how literally the passage on the geometrical number can be understood.
PLATÓN, 2025. Ústava. Seventh, revised edition. Praha: OIKOYMENH. Platónovy dialogy. ISBN
978-80-7298-645-3.
THEIN, Karel, 2014. Filosof, přirozenost a výchova v Ústavě. In: Obec a duše: k Platónově praktické filosofii. Praha: Filosofia, pp. 119–250. ISBN 978-80-7007-426-8