Overture
Plato was born in Athens around 428 BC, into an aristocratic family that had every reason to expect him to enter politics, and he died in the same city some eighty years later, in 348 BC. In the years between he founded a school, wrote the works that would occupy philosophy for the next two thousand years and more, and fixed the figure of his teacher Socrates so firmly in the Western mind that we still picture the man largely as Plato drew him.
That teacher is the first thing to understand, because Socrates wrote nothing. He left no book, no treatise, not a sentence in his own hand. What he did was talk: in the marketplace, the gymnasium, at dinner, stopping men who were sure they knew what courage or justice or piety was, and asking them to say what they meant, until the confident answer fell apart in their hands. In 399 BC the city put him to death for it, on a charge of impiety and of corrupting the young. Plato was then about thirty, and almost everything he went on to write is, in one way or another, a defence of that questioning life and a refusal to let its example die with the man.
He wrote in dialogues, and this matters more than it may seem. Plato never addresses us directly, in his own voice, laying down doctrine. He gives us conversations, most of them led by a character called Socrates, and lets an argument be built, tested, and often left unfinished between the speakers. We are not handed conclusions to memorise; we are made to sit in on the search for them, and left to carry it on ourselves.
Around 387 BC he opened a school on the edge of Athens, in a grove sacred to the hero Academus, and from that grove it took the name by which every academy since has been called. It was less a college than a standing community of enquiry, and it outlasted him by centuries.
At the centre of his thought lies the doctrine that later readers named the theory of Forms. The just deeds, beautiful bodies, and equal things we meet in the world are always shifting, imperfect, and passing away; yet we speak with confidence of justice, beauty, and equality themselves, as though we knew them. Plato’s answer is that we do know them, and that beyond the world our senses report there stands a realm of changeless originals, the Forms, of which the things around us are only copies and shadows. To know anything truly is to turn from the copy towards the original; and the highest of the Forms, the one that makes all the rest knowable, he calls the Good.
The Socrates who argues all this is a difficulty worth naming plainly. In the early dialogues he is recognisably the historical man, questioning everyone and professing to know nothing himself. In the later ones he gradually becomes the mouthpiece for ideas the real Socrates may never have held, ideas that are Plato’s own, set in a beloved mouth. Where the teacher ends and the pupil begins is a question scholars have never finally settled, and an honest reader keeps it open rather than pretending it is closed.
How, then, should he be read. Slowly, and as conversation rather than lecture. These are dialogues, meant to be overheard and argued with, not swallowed whole. Take a few pages at a time. Follow the question further than the answer, for Plato’s Socrates values the first far above the second and often, on purpose, leaves us without the second at all. What follows is a curated reader, not the complete works. It gathers a small number of the greatest passages into six movements, each rendered afresh from Jowett’s translation into modern English and cited to its place in the text, so that a reader may find it and go on to the dialogue itself. After more than two thousand years, those dialogues remain the best introduction anyone has written to the difficulty, and the pleasure, of thinking.
— R. J. H.
I
The Examined Life
Socrates on trial: a wisdom that knows it does not know, and a life worth living.
You must have known Chaerephon. He was a friend of mine from youth, and a friend of the people too, and he was impetuous in everything he did. Once he went to Delphi and boldly put this question to the oracle: he asked whether there was anyone wiser than I was, and the Pythian priestess answered that there was no man wiser. When I heard the answer I said to myself, what can the god mean? What is he hinting at? For I know very well that I have no wisdom, great or small. What can he mean, then, by calling me the wisest of men? He is a god and cannot lie; that would be against his nature.
For a long time I was at a loss, and then I set about looking into the matter in this way. I went to one of the men reputed to be wise, thinking that here, if anywhere, I would prove the answer wrong and show the god that here was a man wiser than I. He was a politician; and when I examined him and fell into conversation with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, though he was thought wise by many, and thought himself wiser still. So I tried to show him that he supposed himself wise without being so, and for my pains he came to hate me. I left him saying to myself: well, I am wiser than this man; neither of us really knows anything fine or good, but he thinks he knows when he does not, while I neither know nor think that I know. In this one small point, then, I seem to have the advantage of him.
After the politicians I went to the poets, and found that it was not by wisdom that they wrote their poetry, but by a kind of genius and inspiration, like seers and prophets who say many fine things without understanding what they mean. Then I went to the skilled craftsmen; and though they truly knew their trades, each of them supposed that because he was good at his own work he understood all manner of high matters besides, and this conceit obscured what wisdom they had. And so I go about the world obedient to the god, and the truth is this: that God alone is wise, and in his oracle he meant that human wisdom is worth little or nothing. He was not speaking of Socrates; he merely took my name as an example, as if to say that the wisest of you is the man who, like Socrates, knows that in truth his wisdom is worth nothing.
— Apology, 21a-23b
If you put me to death, you will not easily find another to take my place. It is almost absurd to say it, but I have been fastened upon this city by the god as a kind of gadfly is fastened upon a horse. The city is like a great and noble horse, sluggish for its very size, and in need of some sting to rouse it. That, I think, is what the god has made me for this city, and so I never stop settling upon you, all day long and everywhere, waking and persuading and reproaching each one of you. You will not easily find another like me, and therefore, if you take my advice, you will spare me. But it is likely enough that in your annoyance, like men shaken out of sleep, you will take Anytus at his word and swat me dead without a thought, and then sleep on for the rest of your days, unless the god in his care for you should send someone else to sting you.
— Apology, 30e
Perhaps someone will say: but Socrates, once you have left us, can you not hold your tongue and live quietly? This is the hardest thing of all to make you believe. For if I tell you that to do so would be to disobey the god, and that this is why I cannot keep quiet, you will think I am not speaking seriously. And if I tell you that there is no greater good for a man than to talk every day about virtue, and about the other things you hear me discussing when I examine myself and others, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you will believe me even less. Yet it is so, gentlemen, however hard it is to convince you of it.
— Apology, 38a
Let us think of it in another way, and we shall see that there is good reason to hope that death is a good. For death is one of two things. Either it is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as we are told, it is a change and a migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if there is no consciousness at all, but only a sleep undisturbed even by dreams, then death must be a wonderful gain. For if a man had to pick out the night in which he slept so soundly that he did not so much as dream, and set beside it all the other days and nights of his life, and then say how many he had passed better and more sweetly than that one, I think that even the Great King himself, and not merely some private man, would find them easy to count. If death is like that, then I call it a gain, for the whole of time seems no longer than a single night.
But if death is a journey to another place, where all the dead are, then what greater good could there be than this? If a man reaches the world below, and is rid there of those who call themselves judges here, and finds the true judges who are said to sit in judgement in that place, would not the journey be worth the making? What would you not give to talk with Orpheus and Homer and Hesiod? If this is true, let me die again and again. There above all I could go on with my questioning, to find out who is truly wise and who only thinks he is; and in that world they do not, I imagine, put a man to death for asking. For besides being happier than we are, those who are there are immortal, if what we are told is true. Be of good cheer, then, about death, and know this for a truth: that no evil can come to a good man, either in life or after death.
— Apology, 40c-41c
II
The Cave and the Sun
The image at the centre of Plato’s thought: shadow, ascent, and the light that makes seeing possible.
Of the good itself I will not speak now, for to reach what is in my mind would be too great a labour. But I will tell you of the child of the good, the thing most like it, if you wish to hear.
You will grant me that there are many beautiful things and many good things, each of which we name and mark off in speech; and that there is also beauty itself and good itself, and so, for everything we called many, a single Form belonging to each, which we call its true being. The many, we say, are seen but not known, while the Forms are known but not seen. Now consider with what part of us we see what is visible. It is by sight; but sight, however keen, and colour, however present in a thing, will show nothing unless a third thing is present, one made by nature for exactly this. And that is what we call light. Noble, then, is the bond that yokes sight to what is seen, and the lord of that light is the sun. Sight is not the sun, nor is the eye in which sight lives the sun; yet of all the organs of sense the eye is the most sunlike, and the power it has is something dealt out to it from the sun. So the sun is not sight, but it is the cause of sight, and is seen by the very sight it causes.
This, then, is what I called the child of the good, which the good brought forth in its own likeness. What the good is in the world we think, in relation to mind and the things of the mind, the sun is in the world we see, in relation to sight and the things of sight. When the soul rests upon that on which truth and being shine, it knows and understands and is bright with intelligence; but when it turns to the dusk of things that come to be and pass away, it holds mere opinion only, blinking and shifting from one view to another. That which sheds truth upon the things known, and gives the knower his power, is the Form of the good. It is the cause of knowledge and of truth, and yet you must think of it as beyond them, more beautiful than either. As light and sight are sunlike but are not the sun, so knowledge and truth are both like the good, yet neither is the good; the good is higher still, and holds a place of greater honour. And just as the sun gives to the things we see not only their being seen but their coming to be, their growth and their nourishment, though the sun itself is not a thing that comes to be, so the good gives to the things we know not only their being known but their very existence and being, though the good itself is not being, but lies still further beyond, surpassing it in dignity and in power.
— Republic, VI, 507b-509c
Picture human beings living in an underground cave, with a long entrance open to the light across its whole width. They have been here since childhood, chained by the leg and the neck so that they cannot move, and can look only straight ahead, for the chains will not let them turn their heads. Behind them, higher up, a fire is burning at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners runs a raised path, with a low wall built along it like the screen that puppeteers set between themselves and their audience, over which they show their puppets. Along this wall men are carrying all sorts of things that rise above it: figures of men and animals in stone and wood and every material, some of the carriers talking, others silent.
A strange picture, you say, and strange prisoners. They are like us, I answer. For could such men have seen anything of themselves or of one another except the shadows thrown by the fire on the wall before them? And of the things carried past, they would see only the shadows. If they could talk together, would they not suppose that in naming the shadows they were naming the real things? For these men the truth would be nothing whatever but the shadows.
Now think what would happen if one of them were set free. Suppose he is made to stand up suddenly, to turn his head and walk and look towards the light. He feels sharp pain; the glare dazzles him; he cannot make out the realities whose shadows he used to see, and he believes the old shadows truer than the things now shown him. And if he is dragged up the steep and rugged ascent by force, and not let go until he stands out in the sunlight, will he not suffer and complain? At first, blinded by the blaze, he can see none of the things we call real. He must grow used to the light by degrees, seeing shadows first, then reflections, then the things themselves, and only at last the sun, not its image in water but the sun in its own place, seen as it is. Then he understands that it is the sun that gives the seasons and the years, and governs all the visible world, and is in a manner the cause of everything he and his fellows once saw.
Remembering his first home, and what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow prisoners, would he not count himself happy in the change, and pity the others? And if he went down again to his old seat, his eyes full of darkness after the sun, and had to compete with the prisoners in judging the shadows while his sight was still dim, would they not laugh, and say he had gone up only to come back with his eyes ruined, and that it was not worth the trying? And if anyone attempted to free them and lead them upward, and they could lay hands on him, would they not kill him?
This whole image you may now set against what we said before. The prison is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and the journey upward and the sight of the things above is the rising of the soul into the world that the mind alone can know. There the Form of the good is seen last of all, and only with effort; but once seen, it must be understood to be the cause of all that is right and beautiful, the parent of light and of the lord of light in the visible world, and the very source of truth and reason in the world of thought. And whoever means to act wisely, in public or in private, must first have caught sight of it.
— Republic, VII, 514a-517a
III
Why Be Just?
A thought experiment about a ring that makes its wearer invisible, and what it exposes.
Grant to the just man and the unjust alike the liberty to do whatever they please, and then follow them and see where desire leads each. We should catch the just man red-handed, going the very way the unjust goes, drawn on by that appetite for advantage which every nature pursues as good, though law bends it back by force towards respect for what is equal. The freedom I mean would be most complete if they had the power that once belonged, so the story goes, to Gyges, the ancestor of Croesus the Lydian. He was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia. One day there was a great storm, and an earthquake broke open the ground where he was pasturing his flock, and left a chasm. Wondering at the sight, he climbed down, and there, among other marvels, he saw a hollow bronze horse with little doors in its side. Stooping to look in, he saw a corpse, larger than a man, as it seemed, wearing nothing but a gold ring on its hand. This he took, and climbed out.
Now the shepherds met, as they did each month, to make their report to the king about the flocks, and Gyges came wearing the ring. As he sat among the others he happened to turn the collet of the ring towards himself, into the palm of his hand, and at once he became invisible, and the men beside him spoke of him as though he had gone. Astonished, he felt for the ring again and turned the collet outwards, and reappeared. After that he made trials of it, and found it was so: turn the stone inward, and he vanished; turn it outward, and he was seen. As soon as he was sure of this, he arranged to be one of the messengers sent to the court; and when he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help set upon the king, killed him, and took the kingdom.
Now suppose there were two such rings, and the just man put on one and the unjust man the other. No one, it seems, would be iron enough to stand fast in justice. No one would keep his hands off what was not his own, when he could take what he liked from the market without fear, or go into any house and lie with whom he pleased, or kill, or set free from prison at will, and walk among men like a god. In this the two would come at last to the very same point; and here, men will say, is a strong proof that no one is just willingly, but only under compulsion. For wherever a man thinks he can do wrong safely, he does wrong. Everyone believes in his heart that injustice pays far better than justice, and he is right to believe it, so the argument runs; since if anyone who had such a power refused to touch what was not his, the onlookers would think him the most wretched fool alive, though they would praise him to each other’s faces, lying to one another for fear of suffering wrong themselves.
— Republic, II, 359a-360d
IV
The Soul in Flight
The soul as a charioteer and two horses, and why it is deathless.
The soul, through all her being, is immortal. For whatever is always in motion is immortal, while that which moves something else, and is itself moved by something else, ceases when the motion ceases, and so ceases to live. Only what moves itself, since it never departs from itself, never ceases to move; it is the fountain and first beginning of motion to everything else that moves. Now a beginning is itself unbegotten. For everything that comes to be must come to be from a beginning, but the beginning itself comes to be from nothing; since if the beginning were begotten of something, it would no longer be the beginning. And being unbegotten, it must also be indestructible; for if a beginning were destroyed, it could never come to be again out of anything, nor could anything else come to be out of it, since all things must arise from a beginning. So the self-moving is the beginning of motion, and this can neither be destroyed nor brought into being, or else the whole heaven and all that has come to be would collapse into stillness, and never again find anything to set it moving. But if what moves itself is shown to be immortal, no one need be ashamed to say that this self-motion is the very essence and definition of the soul. For any body that is moved from outside is soulless, while a body moved from within, out of itself, has a soul, since this is the very nature of the soul. And if this is so, that what moves itself is nothing other than the soul, then the soul must be unbegotten and immortal.
— Phaedrus, 245c-246a
Of the nature of the soul let me speak in a figure, though to tell her true form would be a theme for a god and a long telling. Let the figure be this: a team of two winged horses and a charioteer joined in one power. The horses and charioteers of the gods are all noble, and come of noble stock; but ours are mixed. Our charioteer drives a pair, and one of the two is beautiful and good and well bred, while the other is opposite in nature and in breeding; so with us the driving is hard and troublesome. The wing, more than anything belonging to the body, shares in the divine, and by nature it lifts what is heavy up towards the region where the gods dwell. What is divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and all such things; and on these the wing of the soul is fed and grows, but by what is foul and evil it wastes and falls away.
Zeus, the great captain in heaven, driving his winged chariot, goes first, ordering all things and caring for all; and behind him follows the host of gods and demigods, ranged in eleven companies. Many blessed sights there are within the heaven, and many turnings of the road, along which the happy gods pass to and fro, each about his own work; and whoever will and can follows after, for envy has no place in the divine choir. But when they go to feast, they climb the steep way to the summit of the arch that holds up the sky. The chariots of the gods, well balanced and obedient to the rein, go smoothly; the rest go hard, for the horse with badness in him drags down, weighing towards the earth any charioteer who has not trained him well. And here comes the soul’s uttermost labour and struggle. For the souls that are called immortal, when they reach the top, pass outside and stand upon the outer surface of heaven, and as they stand the revolution carries them round, and they gaze on what lies beyond.
Of that place beyond the heaven no poet here below has ever sung, or ever will sing, as it deserves. Yet I must try to tell the truth, since truth is my theme. There, without colour, without shape, without hardness, is the very being that truly is, seen only by the mind, the soul’s one pilot; and about it the true knowledge dwells. So the mind of a god, fed upon reason and pure knowledge, and the mind of every soul that cares to take in what belongs to it, is glad at last to see what truly is, and is nourished and made happy in beholding truth, until the circling motion brings it round again to the same place.
— Phaedrus, 246a-247c
V
The Ladder of Love
Diotima teaches Socrates how desire climbs from one beautiful body to beauty itself.
He who would go the right way to this end should begin, while he is young, by turning to beautiful bodies; and if his guide leads him rightly, he will love one such body first, and there bring to birth beautiful thoughts. Soon he will see for himself that the beauty of one body is sister to the beauty of every other, and that if he is to pursue beauty of form, it would be great folly not to hold the beauty of all bodies to be one and the same. Once he has grasped this, he will become a lover of all beautiful bodies, and will slacken this violent passion for the one, thinking it a small thing and beneath him. After this he will count the beauty of the soul more precious than the beauty of the body, so that if he meets someone fair in soul but with little bloom, he will be content to love and tend him, and to bring forth such thoughts as make the young better. And so he will be led to look upon the beauty that is in our ways of living and in our laws, and to see that all of it is akin, and that the beauty of the body is a small thing. From our ways of living he will be brought on to the sciences, and will see their beauty too; and looking now upon beauty in its vastness, he will no longer be like a servant, content with the beauty of a single boy or man or custom, a slave, poor and narrow. Turned towards the wide sea of beauty and gazing upon it, he will give birth to many beautiful and magnificent thoughts in the ungrudging love of wisdom, until, made strong and full by this, he catches sight of one science alone, which is the science of a beauty I will now try to name.
Here, then, give me all the attention you can. Whoever has been schooled so far in the things of love, beholding beautiful things in the right order, will now, as he draws near the end, catch sight of something wonderful and beautiful in its very nature; and this, Socrates, is the goal of all his labours before. First, it always is, and neither comes to be nor passes away, neither grows nor wastes. Next, it is not beautiful in one part and ugly in another, nor beautiful now and not then, nor beautiful in one relation and ugly in another, as though it were beautiful to some and ugly to others. It will not show itself to him as a face or hands or anything else that the body shares in, nor as a thought or a piece of knowledge, nor as a thing that lives somewhere in something else, in an animal, say, or in earth or in heaven; but as itself, by itself, with itself, one in form and everlasting; while all the other beautiful things share in it in such a way that, as they come to be and pass away, it grows neither greater nor less, and nothing at all happens to it. And the right way to the things of love, whether one goes alone or is led by another, is to begin from the beautiful things here and to mount upward for the sake of that beauty, climbing as if by a stair, from one beautiful body to two, and from two to all, and from beautiful bodies to beautiful ways of living, and from these to beautiful learning, until from all this one comes at last to that learning which is the learning of nothing other than the beautiful itself, and knows at last what beauty is.
— Symposium, 210a-212a
VI
The Choice of Lives
The myth of Er: souls choosing their next lives, and where the responsibility lies.
When the souls came, they had to go at once to Lachesis. First a prophet set them in order; then, taking lots and patterns of lives from the knees of Lachesis, he climbed a high platform and said: ‘Hear the word of Lachesis, daughter of Necessity. Souls that live but a day, here begins another round of life that ends in death. No guardian spirit will be allotted to you; you shall choose your own. Let him who draws the first lot choose first the life that shall then be his by necessity. Virtue owns no master; each shall have more of her or less as he honours or dishonours her. The blame is the chooser’s; God bears none.’
So saying, he cast the lots among them, and each took up the one that fell beside him; and then he set out on the ground before them the patterns of lives, many more than the souls present, and of every kind. There were lives of all living things, and all the lives of men: tyrannies among them, some lasting to the end, others broken off midway in poverty, exile, and beggary; lives famous for beauty or strength or high birth, and lives that were the opposite. Here, my dear Glaucon, is the whole danger of our human state, and for this reason each of us should set aside every other study and seek out this one alone: to learn and discern the good life from the bad, and always, everywhere, to choose the better so far as he can. He should weigh all the things we have spoken of, together and against each other, with an eye to the goodness of a life; he should know what beauty does when it is mixed with poverty or with wealth, and what comes of this or that kind of birth, of private station and public office, of strength and weakness, of quick wits and slow, and the rest; so that, looking to the nature of the soul, he may choose between the worse life and the better, calling that life worse which leads the soul to become more unjust, and that better which leads it to become more just. Every other consideration he will let go, for we have seen that this is the best choice, in life and in death.
Now the first to choose went straight to the greatest tyranny; and his folly and greed were such that he did not look into everything before he chose, and did not see that it was fated to include the eating of his own children, and other horrors. When he examined it at leisure, he beat his breast and bewailed his choice, and, instead of blaming himself for his misfortunes, he blamed chance and the gods and anything rather than himself. He was one of those who had come down from heaven, having lived his former life in a well-ordered city, with a virtue that was only habit and no philosophy. And so it was, on the whole, that most of those caught in this way had come from heaven, untried by suffering, while those who came up from the earth, having suffered themselves and seen others suffer, were in no haste to choose.
— Republic, X, 617d-620e
A Note on Sources
Every passage in this reader is Nova Ars Vivendi’s own rendering, made for this edition. The base text throughout is Benjamin Jowett’s English translation of Plato, the great Victorian version produced at Oxford from 1871 onwards. Jowett died in 1893, and his translations have long been in the public domain. The method here is the one used for the other readers in this series: keep faithfully to the translator’s reading of the Greek, but ease his Victorian English into clear modern British prose, so that the argument comes through to a reader today without anything being added to it or taken from it. Where Jowett’s phrasing is already plain, it is left almost untouched; where it has grown ornate or old-fashioned, it is quieted. Nothing is summarised away, and no thought of Plato’s is introduced that is not in the text before us.
Four dialogues are drawn on: the Apology, the Republic, the Phaedrus, and the Symposium. Each passage is cited by dialogue and by Stephanus number, the standard reference taken from Henri Estienne’s edition of 1578, printed in the margins of nearly every edition of Plato, which lets any passage be found in any translation. Full provenance, with the Project Gutenberg source numbers for each text, is recorded in this folder’s sources/PROVENANCE.md.
Every citation has been checked against the public-domain source texts in this fidelity pass, and each passage has been set beside Jowett’s wording to confirm that his reading, and not a paraphrase from memory, stands behind the modern English printed here.