Complete Works (239 page)

There is something more important. However, even for the virtues themselves, it isn’t enough to look at a mere sketch, as we did before, while neglecting the most complete account. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it, to strain every nerve to attain the utmost exactness and clarity about other things of little value and not to consider the most important things worthy of the greatest exactness? [e]

It certainly is. But do you think that anyone is going to let you off without asking you what this most important subject is and what it concerns?

No, indeed, and you can ask me too. You’ve certainly heard the answer often enough, but now either you aren’t thinking or you intend to make trouble for me again by interrupting. And I suspect the latter, for you’ve often heard it said that the form of the good is the most important thing
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to learn about and that it’s by their relation to it that just things and the others become useful and beneficial. You know very well now that I am going to say this, and, besides, that we have no adequate knowledge of it. And you also know that, if we don’t know it, even the fullest possible knowledge of other things is of no benefit to us, any more than if we acquire any possession without the good of it. Or do you think that it is any advantage to have every kind of possession without the good of it? [b] Or to know everything except the good, thereby knowing nothing fine or good?

No, by god, I don’t.

Furthermore, you certainly know that the majority believe that pleasure is the good, while the more sophisticated believe that it is knowledge.

Indeed I do.

And you know that those who believe this can’t tell us what sort of knowledge it is, however, but in the end are forced to say that it is knowledge of the good.

And that’s ridiculous.

[c] Of course it is. They blame us for not knowing the good and then turn around and talk to us as if we did know it. They say that it is knowledge of the good—as if we understood what they’re speaking about when they utter the word “good.”

That’s completely true.

What about those who define the good as pleasure? Are they any less full of confusion than the others? Aren’t even they forced to admit that there are bad pleasures?

Most definitely.

So, I think, they have to agree that the same things are both good and bad. Isn’t that true?

[d] Of course.

It’s clear, then, isn’t it, why there are many large controversies about this?

How could it be otherwise?

And isn’t this also clear? In the case of just and beautiful things, many people are content with what are believed to be so, even if they aren’t really so, and they act, acquire, and form their own beliefs on that basis. Nobody is satisfied to acquire things that are merely believed to be good, however, but everyone wants the things that really
are
good and disdains mere belief here.

That’s right. [e]

Every soul pursues the good and does its utmost for its sake. It divines that the good is something but it is perplexed and cannot adequately grasp what it is or acquire the sort of stable beliefs it has about other things, and so it misses the benefit, if any, that even those other things may give. Will we allow the best people in the city, to whom we entrust everything,
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to be so in the dark about something of this kind and of this importance?

That’s the last thing we’d do.

I don’t suppose, at least, that just and fine things will have acquired much of a guardian in someone who doesn’t even know in what way they are good. And I divine that no one will have adequate knowledge of them until he knows this.

You’ve divined well.

But won’t our constitution be perfectly ordered, if a guardian who knows these things is in charge of it? [b]

Necessarily. But, Socrates, you must also tell us whether you consider the good to be knowledge or pleasure or something else altogether.

What a man! It’s been clear for some time that other people’s opinions about these matters wouldn’t satisfy you.

Well, Socrates, it doesn’t seem right to me for you to be willing to state other people’s convictions but not your own, especially when you’ve spent so much time occupied with these matters. [c]

What? Do you think it’s right to talk about things one doesn’t know as if one does know them?

Not as if one knows them, he said, but one ought to be willing to state one’s opinions as such.

What? Haven’t you noticed that opinions without knowledge are shameful and ugly things? The best of them are blind—or do you think that those who express a true opinion without understanding are any different from blind people who happen to travel the right road?

They’re no different.

Do you want to look at shameful, blind, and crooked things, then, when you might hear illuminating and fine ones from other people? [d]

By god, Socrates, Glaucon said, don’t desert us with the end almost in sight. We’ll be satisfied if you discuss the good as you discussed justice, moderation, and the rest.

That, my friend, I said, would satisfy me too, but I’m afraid that I won’t be up to it and that I’ll disgrace myself and look ridiculous by trying. So let’s abandon the quest for what the good itself is for the time being, for even to arrive at my own view about it is too big a topic for the discussion [e] we are now started on. But I am willing to tell you about what is apparently an offspring of the good and most like it. Is that agreeable to you, or would you rather we let the whole matter drop?

It is. The story about the father remains a debt you’ll pay another time.

I wish that I could pay the debt in full, and you receive it instead of
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just the interest. So here, then, is this child and offspring of the good. But be careful that I don’t somehow deceive you unintentionally by giving you an illegitimate account of the child.
¹⁰

We’ll be as careful as possible, so speak on.

I will when we’ve come to an agreement and recalled some things that we’ve already said both here and many other times.

Which ones? [b]

We say that there are many beautiful things and many good things, and so on for each kind, and in this way we distinguish them in words.

We do.

And beauty itself and good itself and all the things that we thereby set down as many, reversing ourselves, we set down according to a single form of each, believing that there is but one, and call it “the being” of each.

That’s true.

And we say that the many beautiful things and the rest are visible but not intelligible, while the forms are intelligible but not visible.

That’s completely true.

[c] With what part of ourselves do we see visible things?

With our sight.

And so audible things are heard by hearing, and with our other senses we perceive all the other perceptible things.

That’s right.

Have you considered how lavish the maker of our senses was in making the power to see and be seen?

I can’t say I have.

Well, consider it this way. Do hearing and sound need another kind of thing in order for the former to hear and the latter to be heard, a third [d] thing in whose absence the one won’t hear or the other be heard?

No, they need nothing else.

And if there are any others that need such a thing, there can’t be many of them. Can you think of one?

I can’t.

You don’t realize that sight and the visible have such a need?

How so?

Sight may be present in the eyes, and the one who has it may try to use it, and colors may be present in things, but unless a third kind of thing is present, which is naturally adapted for this very purpose, you know that [e] sight will see nothing, and the colors will remain unseen.

What kind of thing do you mean?

I mean what you call light.

You’re right.

Then it isn’t an insignificant kind of link that connects the sense of sight
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and the power to be seen—it is a more valuable link than any other linked things have got, if indeed light is something valuable.

And, of course, it’s very valuable.

Which of the gods in heaven would you name as the cause and controller of this, the one whose light causes our sight to see in the best way and the visible things to be seen?

The same one you and others would name. Obviously, the answer to your question is the sun.

And isn’t sight by nature related to that god in this way?

Which way?

Sight isn’t the sun, neither sight itself nor that in which it comes to be, namely, the eye. [b]

No, it certainly isn’t.

But I think that it is the most sunlike of the senses.

Very much so.

And it receives from the sun the power it has, just like an influx from an overflowing treasury.

Certainly.

The sun is not sight, but isn’t it the cause of sight itself and seen by it?

That’s right.

Let’s say, then, that this is what I called the offspring of the good, which the good begot as its analogue. What the good itself is in the intelligible realm, in relation to understanding and intelligible things, the sun is in the visible realm, in relation to sight and visible things. [c]

How? Explain a bit more.

You know that, when we turn our eyes to things whose colors are no longer illuminated by the light of day but by night lights, the eyes are dimmed and seem nearly blind, as if clear vision were no longer in them.

Of course.

Yet whenever one turns them on things illuminated by the sun, they see clearly, and vision appears in those very same eyes? [d]

Indeed.

Well, understand the soul in the same way: When it focuses on something illuminated by truth and what is, it understands, knows, and apparently possesses understanding, but when it focuses on what is mixed with obscurity, on what comes to be and passes away, it opines and is dimmed, changes its opinions this way and that, and seems bereft of understanding.

It does seem that way.

So that what gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower is the form of the good. And though it is the cause of [e] knowledge and truth, it is also an object of knowledge.
¹¹
Both knowledge and truth are beautiful things, but the good is other and more beautiful than they. In the visible realm, light and sight are rightly considered sunlike, but it is wrong to think that they are the sun, so here it is right to think of knowledge and truth as goodlike but wrong to think that either
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of them is the good—for the good is yet more prized.

This is an inconceivably beautiful thing you’re talking about, if it provides both knowledge and truth and is superior to them in beauty. You surely don’t think that a thing like that could be pleasure.

Hush! Let’s examine its image in more detail as follows.

How? [b]

You’ll be willing to say, I think, that the sun not only provides visible things with the power to be seen but also with coming to be, growth, and nourishment, although it is not itself coming to be.

How could it be?

Therefore, you should also say that not only do the objects of knowledge owe their being known to the good, but their being is also due to it, although the good is not being, but superior to it in rank and power.

[c] And Glaucon comically said: By Apollo, what a daemonic superiority!

It’s your own fault; you forced me to tell you my opinion about it.

And I don’t want you to stop either. So continue to explain its similarity to the sun, if you’ve omitted anything.

I’m certainly omitting a lot.

Well, don’t, not even the smallest thing.

I think I’ll have to omit a fair bit, but, as far as is possible at the moment, I won’t omit anything voluntarily.

Don’t.

[d] Understand, then, that, as we said, there are these two things, one sovereign of the intelligible kind and place, the other of the visible (I don’t say “of heaven” so as not to seem to you to be playing the sophist with the name).
¹²
In any case, you have two kinds of thing, visible and intelligible.

Right.

It is like a line divided into two unequal sections.
¹³
Then divide each section—namely, that of the visible and that of the intelligible—in the same ratio as the line. In terms now of relative clarity and opacity, one subsection of the visible consists of images. And by images I mean, first, shadows, then reflections in water and in all close-packed, smooth, and [e] shiny materials, and everything of that sort, if you understand.
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I do.

In the other subsection of the visible, put the originals of these images, namely, the animals around us, all the plants, and the whole class of manufactured things.

Consider them put.

Would you be willing to say that, as regards truth and untruth, the division is in this proportion: As the opinable is to the knowable, so the likeness is to the thing that it is like?

Certainly. [b]

Consider now how the section of the intelligible is to be divided.

How?

As follows: In one subsection, the soul, using as images the things that were imitated before, is forced to investigate from hypotheses, proceeding not to a first principle but to a conclusion. In the other subsection, however, it makes its way to a first principle that is
not
a hypothesis, proceeding from a hypothesis but without the images used in the previous subsection, using forms themselves and making its investigation through them.

I don’t yet fully understand what you mean.

Let’s try again. You’ll understand it more easily after the following [c] preamble. I think you know that students of geometry, calculation, and the like hypothesize the odd and the even, the various figures, the three kinds of angles, and other things akin to these in each of their investigations, as if they knew them. They make these their hypotheses and don’t think it necessary to give any account of them, either to themselves or to others, as if they were clear to everyone. And going from these first principles through the remaining steps, they arrive in full agreement. [d]