Socrates' Views on Who Would Be Qualified to Be a Ruler of a City

The discussion between Socrates and the brothers, Ademantus and Glaucon, continues as they design a just city. This portion of the discussion begins with Socrates posing the next issue they face: “how the saviors of our constitution will come to be in the city, what subjects and ways of life will cause them to come into being, and at what ages they‘ll take each of them up”, So Socrates decides to recap exactly who they said would be qualified to be the ruler of the city saying that: they must be “lovers of their city when tested by pleasure and pain” and they must be able to “hold on to their resolve through labors, fears, and all other adversities”.

Socrates goes on to say that those who would be guardians of the city must also be philosophers and then points out that the kind of people that would meet the requirements in order to be guardian are rare.

Socrates explains his point saying that those who possess quick wits and follow wherever chance takes them lack stability, which is a central feature of those who aren’t easily frightened in battle and tend to be reliable, In order for someone to get a fine education, they must have a “goodly share”  of both quick wits and stability.

Socrates says that such balanced people tend to be rare. Socrates then returns to a previous discussion: he reviews their search for justice, moderation, courage, and wisdom in humanity and points out an omission in their discussion— they didn‘t exactly define good and in failing to do so their whole argument falls short and isn’t a measure of anything.

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Socrates proceeds to posit what exactly ‘good’ may be. Socrates points out that the majority of people believe that pleasure is good, while the sophisticated believe that knowledge is good.

The sophisticated not being able to specify exactly what kind of knowledge is good while the majority are forced to admit that there are bad pleasures and therefore not all pleasures are good, Yet still people desire good—notjust something that looks like good, “Every wants the things that really are good and disdains mere belief here“. If the constitution of the city is to perfectly ordered, Socrates says that the guardians must know what good is. Socrates claims that his opinion of good is uninformed and therefore “shameful and ugly” to share, however he is able to talk about the products of good, Socrates says that people speak of many objects as good In all these many different objects, we find that they are all in accord with each other through having a single form— “the being” of each. This being is intelligible but not visible.

To explain this point, Socrates moves on to discuss as to how visibility is analogous to intelligibility. He says that visible things are seen by sight and sight requires three things in order to see and be seen. First is the ability to see, second is the colors to be seen, and third is light to illumine the colors to be seen and enable the eye to see. The ‘God‘ in heaven that controls light is the sun, the same way that the ‘God’ that controls truth in intelligible things is good Where “good itself is in the intelligible realm” while the “sun is in the visible realm, in relation to sight and visible things” . The same way that in the dark our eyes are blind while in the sun we can see clearly, so too mixed in obscurity we cannot grasp ideas fully while illumined by truth we understand Knowledge and truth are good things but they are not good itself, the same way that light and sight are sun—like but they are not considered the sun, Furthermore, the sun “not only provides visible things with the power to be seen but also with coming to be”. Therefore, knowledge is not only illumined by good but exists because of goodigood therefore must be greater than knowledge.

All things can be separated into two groups—the visible and the intelligible, The visible can be further separated into images (shadows, reflection in water, shiny materials, etc.) and the originals of those images, which is everything around us The same type of division can be made of the intelligible, Using geometry and mathematics as an example, those who are students of mathematics hypothesize about various figures, numbers, angles, and shapes and discuss these hypotheses as if everyone understands what the first principles behind them are. The first principles that everyone understands is like the original images that we see, while the hypotheses and ideas that the students of mathematics derive from these first principles are like the reflected images of Visible original objects Socrates ends by saying that the soul has four conditions: understanding, thought, belief, and imaging. Arranging them in a ratio will give clarity as to the degree that each part “is set over shares in truth”