Complete Works (281 page)

A
THENIAN
: Well then, on your part you are prepared to listen, apparently; on my side, I am ready and willing to go ahead, but the job will certainly tax my abilities. Still, the effort must be made. To assist the argument, we ought to take the preliminary step of defining education and its potentialities, because we have ventured on a discussion which is intended to lead us to the god of wine, and we are agreed that education is as it were the route we have to take.

C
LINIAS
: Certainly let’s do that, if you like.

A
THENIAN
: I am going to explain how one should describe education: [b] see if you approve of my account.

C
LINIAS
: Your explanation, then, please.

A
THENIAN
: It is this: I insist that a man who intends to be good at a particular occupation must practice it from childhood: both at work and at play he must be surrounded by the special ‘tools of the trade’. For instance, the man who intends to be a good farmer must play at farming, and the man who is to be a good builder must spend his playtime building [c] toy houses; and in each case the teacher must provide miniature tools that copy the real thing. In particular, in this elementary stage they must learn the essential elementary skills. For example, the carpenter must learn in his play how to handle a rule and plumb-line, and the soldier must learn to ride a horse (either by actually doing it, in play, or by some similar activity). We should try to use the children’s games to channel their pleasures and desires towards the activities in which they will have to engage when they are adult. To sum up, we say that the correct way to bring up [d] and educate a child is to use his playtime to imbue his soul with the greatest possible liking for the occupation in which he will have to be absolutely perfect when he grows up. Now, as I suggested, consider the argument so far: do you approve of my account?

C
LINIAS
: Of course.

A
THENIAN
: But let’s not leave our description of education in the air. When we abuse or commend the upbringing of individual people and say that one of us is educated and the other uneducated, we sometimes use this latter term of men who have in fact had a thorough education—one directed towards petty trade or the merchant-shipping business, or [e] something like that. But I take it that for the purpose of the present discussion we are not going to treat this sort of thing as ‘education’; what we have in mind is education from childhood in
virtue,
a training which produces a keen desire to become a perfect citizen who knows how to rule and be ruled as justice demands. I suppose we should want to mark
[644]
off this sort of training from others and reserve the title ‘education’ for it alone. A training directed to acquiring money or a robust physique, or even to some intellectual facility not guided by reason and justice, we should want to call coarse and illiberal, and say that it had no claim whatever to be called education. Still, let’s not quibble over a name; let’s stick to the proposition we agreed on just now: as a rule, men with a correct education become good, and nowhere in the world should education be [b] despised, for when combined with great virtue, it is an asset of incalculable value. If it ever becomes corrupt, but can be put right again, this is a lifelong task which everyone should undertake to the limit of his strength.

C
LINIAS
: True. We agree with your description.

A
THENIAN
: Here is a further point on which we agreed some time ago:
¹⁵
those who can control themselves are good, those who cannot are bad.

C
LINIAS
: Perfectly correct.

[c] A
THENIAN
: Let’s take up this point again and consider even more closely just what we mean. Perhaps you’ll let me try to clarify the issue by means of an illustration.

C
LINIAS
: By all means.

A
THENIAN
: Are we to assume, then, that each of us is a single individual?

C
LINIAS
: Yes.

A
THENIAN
: But that he possesses within himself a pair of witless and mutually antagonistic advisers, which we call pleasure and pain?

C
LINIAS
: That is so.

A
THENIAN
: In addition to these two, he has opinions about the future, whose general name is ‘expectations’. Specifically, the anticipation of pain [d] is called ‘fear’, and the anticipation of the opposite is called ‘confidence’. Over and against all these we have ‘calculation’, by which we judge the relative merits of pleasure and pain, and when this is expressed as a public decision of a state, it receives the title ‘law’.

C
LINIAS
: I can scarcely follow you; but assume I do, and carry on with what comes next.

M
EGILLUS
: Yes, I’m in the same difficulty.

A
THENIAN
: I suggest we look at the problem in this way: let’s imagine that each of us living beings is a puppet of the gods. Whether we have been constructed to serve as their plaything, or for some serious reason, [e] is something beyond our ken, but what we certainly do know is this: we have these emotions in us, which act like cords or strings and tug us about; they work in opposition, and tug against each other to make us perform actions that are opposed correspondingly; back and forth we go across the boundary line where vice and virtue meet. One of these dragging forces, according to our argument, demands our constant obedience, and this is
[645]
the one we have to hang on to, come what may; the pull of the other cords we must resist. This cord, which is golden and holy, transmits the power of ‘calculation’, a power which in a state is called the public law; being golden, it is pliant, while the others, whose composition resembles a variety of other substances, are tough and inflexible. The force exerted by law is excellent, and one should always co-operate with it, because although ‘calculation’ is a noble thing, it is gentle, not violent, and its efforts need assistants, so that the gold in us may prevail over the other substances. If [b] we do give our help, the moral point of this fable, in which we appear as puppets, will have been well and truly made; the meaning of the terms ‘self-superior’ and ‘self-inferior’
¹⁶
will somehow become clearer, and the duties of state and individual will be better appreciated. The latter must digest the truth about these forces that pull him, and act on it in his life; the state must get an account of it either from one of the gods or from the human expert we’ve mentioned, and incorporate it in the form of a law to govern both its internal affairs and its relations with other states. A further result will be a clearer distinction between virtue and vice; the [c] light cast on that problem will perhaps in turn help to clarify the subject of education and the various other practices, particularly the business of drinking parties. It may well be thought that this is a triviality on which a great deal too much has been said, but equally it may turn out that the topic really does deserve this extended discussion.

C
LINIAS
: You are quite right; we certainly ought to give full consideration to anything that deserves our attention in the ‘symposium’ we are having now.

A
THENIAN
: Well then, tell me: if we give drink to this puppet of ours, [d] what effect do we have on it?

C
LINIAS
: What’s your purpose in harking back to that question?

A
THENIAN
: No particular purpose, for the moment. I’m just asking, in a general way, what effect is had on something when it is associated with something else. I’ll try to explain my meaning even more clearly. This is what I’m asking; does drinking wine make pleasures and pains, anger and love, more intense?

C
LINIAS
: Very much so.

A
THENIAN
: What about sensations, memory, opinions and thought? Do [e] these too become more intense? Or rather, don’t they entirely desert a man if he fills himself with drink?

C
LINIAS
: Yes, they desert him entirely.

A
THENIAN
: So he reverts to the mental state he was in as a young child?

C
LINIAS
: Indeed.

A
THENIAN
: And it’s then that his self-control would be at its lowest?

C
LINIAS
: Yes, at its lowest.
[646]

A
THENIAN
: A man in that condition, we agree, is very bad indeed.

C
LINIAS
: Very.

A
THENIAN
: So it looks as if it’s not only an old man who will go through a second childhood, but the drunkard too.

C
LINIAS
: That’s well said, sir.

A
THENIAN
: Now, is there any argument that could even begin to persuade us that we ought to venture on this practice, rather than make every possible effort to avoid it?

C
LINIAS
: Apparently there is; at any rate, this is what you say, and a minute ago you were ready to produce it.

[b] A
THENIAN
: A correct reminder; I’m ready still, now that you have both said you would be glad to listen to me.

C
LINIAS
: We’ll be all ears, sir, if only because of your amazing paradox that a man should, on occasions, voluntarily abandon himself to extreme depravity.

A
THENIAN
: You mean spiritual depravity, don’t you?

C
LINIAS
: Yes.

A
THENIAN
: And what about degradation of the body, my friend—emaciation, disfigurement, ugliness, impotence? Shouldn’t we be startled to find [c] a man voluntarily reducing himself to such a state?

C
LINIAS
: Of course we should.

A
THENIAN
: We don’t suppose, do we, that those who voluntarily take themselves off to the surgery in order to drink down medicines are unaware of the fact that very soon after, for days on end, their condition will be such that, if it were to be anything more than temporary, it would make life insupportable? We know, surely, that those who resort to gymnasia for vigorous exercises become temporarily enfeebled?

C
LINIAS
: Yes, we are aware of all this.

A
THENIAN
: And of the fact that they go there of their own accord, for the sake of the benefit they will receive after the initial stages?

[d] C
LINIAS
: Most certainly.

A
THENIAN
: So shouldn’t we look at the other practices in the same light?

C
LINIAS
: Yes indeed.

A
THENIAN
: So the same view should be taken of time spent in one’s cups—if, that is, we may think of it as a legitimate parallel.

C
LINIAS
: Of course.

A
THENIAN
: Now if time so spent turned out to benefit us no less than time devoted to the body, it would have the initial advantage over physical exercises in that, unlike them, it is painless.

[e] C
LINIAS
: You’re right enough in that, but I’d be surprised if we could discover any such benefit in this case.

A
THENIAN
: Then this is the point it looks as if we ought to be trying to explain. Tell me: can we conceive of two roughly opposite kinds of fear?

C
LINIAS
: Which?

A
THENIAN
: These: when we expect evils to occur, we are in fear of them, I suppose?

C
LINIAS
: Yes.

A
THENIAN
: And we often fear for our reputation, when we imagine we
[647]
are going to get a bad name for doing or saying something disgraceful. This is the fear which we, and I fancy everyone else, call ‘shame’.

C
LINIAS
: Surely.

A
THENIAN
: These are the two fears I meant. The second resists pains and the other things we dread, as well as our keenest and most frequent pleasures.

C
LINIAS
: Very true.

A
THENIAN
: The legislator, then, and anybody of the slightest merit, values this fear very highly, and gives it the name ‘modesty’. The feeling of confidence that is its opposite he calls ‘insolence’, and reckons it to be the biggest curse anyone could suffer, whether in his private or his public life.

C
LINIAS
: True. [b]

A
THENIAN
: So this fear not only safeguards us in a lot of other crucial areas of conduct but contributes more than anything else, if we take one thing with another, to the security that follows victory in war. Two things, then, contribute to victory: fearlessness in face of the enemy, and fear of ill-repute among one’s friends.

C
LINIAS
: Exactly.

A
THENIAN
: Every individual should therefore become both afraid and unafraid, for the reasons we have distinguished in each case. [c]

C
LINIAS
: Certainly.

A
THENIAN
: Moreover, if we want to make an individual proof against all sorts of fears, it is by exposing him to fear, in a way sanctioned by the law, that we make him unafraid.

C
LINIAS
: Evidently we do.

A
THENIAN
: But what about our attempts to make a man
afraid,
in a way consistent with justice? Shouldn’t we see that he enters the lists against impudence, and give him training to resist it, so as to make him conquer in the struggle with his pleasures? A man has to fight and conquer his [d] feelings of cowardice before he can achieve perfect courage; if he has no experience and training in that kind of struggle, he will never more than half realize his potentialities for virtue. Isn’t the same true of self-control? Will he ever achieve a perfect mastery here without having fought and conquered, with all the skills of speech and action both in work and play, the crowd of pleasures and desires that stimulate him to act shamelessly and unjustly? Can he afford
not
to have the experience of all these struggles?