The Divided Line: Hesiod, Socrates, Plato

Republic is a text that should be read attentively to be aware of how the theme of philosophical education is carried along on two different levels. The first level can be regarded as the education of Adeimentus and Glaucon by Socrates. The second one, on a broader sense, is the educational purposes of Plato on the readers that can only be accessed via the understanding of the text in its completeness. It is important to note that the text can be misleading if the reader only focuses on the former level and ignores the latter. That is to say, how Socrates proceeds on the path of education is confusing with all the different ingredients of the discussion. Without noticing the irony, that is the medium used by Plato to awaken the reader, it is very likely for the reader to get lost in the contradicting claims of Socrates when he introduces the analogy of the ideal city and its correspondence to the soul, which is actually in collision. Furthermore, the allegory of the sun, the divided line and the cave introduced in the books 6 and 7 are also in collision with the analogy of the ideal city, but they perfectly serve as means of understanding the way how Socrates approaches to the matter of education.  

It is not easy to analyze the text separately on the two different levels mentioned above since what Socrates and Plato aims in the sense of education are harmonious. Therefore, it will be appropriate first to focus on the form of education as understood both by Socrates and Plato and trace the signs of that form in the text. As far as the discussion in Plato’s texts leads, one comes to a sense of education through which the individual trades off the beliefs to the truth in order to attain virtue. Yet such a journey of mind necessitates willingness, which is the foremost aim of education. That is to say, since acquiring virtue is not something for the ignorant mind, it should be awakened through dialectical discussion as it is in Socrates and Plato. In that regard, every piece of text involving Socrates discussing with a less virtuous mind can be perceived as a way of education. And each example of this educational process finds its ultimate form – abstract – in the allegory of the cave. The individual in the conformity of the socially accepted norms, two-dimensional shadows on the wall in the case of the cave, should be taken out of his ignorance - the cave - and be exposed to the sunlight to realize the real form of the objects to have an understanding of the good. This methodology of education presented in the allegory of the cave is reflected upon the Socratic dialogues. What Socrates does is first to destroy what his listeners, Adeimentus and Glaucon, believed so far which in turn leaves these minds in a loose, shaky ground of existence. In that regard, Socrates defines this first encounter with truth as such:

“…This instrument by means of which each person learns, is like an eye which can only be turned away from the darkness and towards the light by turning the whole body…Education, then, would be the art of directing this instrument of finding the easiest and most effective way of turning it round.”

For that matter, the first aim of education is to save the person from the weights implanted on soul by custom and habit. Socrates seems to manage this objective through questioning the taken-for-granted beliefs and opinions of individuals until they reach a point at which their eyesight is coerced to look for truth. For those who are capable of divine rational thought with a pleasant nature the discussion leads to a new realm of understanding and thinking by following the arguments of Socrates. Here, it is important to ask to what degree Adeimentus and Glaucon achieve the aim of Socratic education. The answer to that question leads the reader to separate the two levels of education that is carried throughout the text. To illustrate, the very nature of Platonic dialogues is based upon logical, strictly constructed, step-by-step arguments and allegories because of the need to take things slow. On several occasions, the figures beside Socrates may seem numb to the reader because of demanding repetitions and examples on the issues examined in the text. Phrases like ‘How do you mean?’, ‘What is that?’, ‘such as?’, ‘Explain’ don’t seem to be accidental responses on the part of the person exposed to Socratic dialectics. On the contrary, these are very reflective of the current state of mind in which the eyesight is not yet accustomed to the new environment. Besides from that, in Platonic dialogues, most of the responses are just remarks of agreement or understanding like, ‘certainly’, ‘precisely’, ‘I agree’ and such. These remarks are crucial to understand the role of the educator at that point in terms of providing a well-structured dialectical way of thinking to the person to expand and accustom his/her eyesight.

            Following, as the soul is exposed to this new environment, it tends to go backward and forward but not in a linear line of thought. The person is inclined to be confused and run away from the new things pointed out at him, as it was the case with Thrasymachus and Adeimantus at some occasions. This experience is illustrated in the allegory as such:

“And if he was dragged out of there by force, up the steep and difficult path, with no pause until he had been dragged right into the sunlight, wouldn’t he find this dragging painful? Wouldn’t he resent it? And when he came into the light, with his eyes filled with the glare, would he be able to see a single one of the things he is now told are true?”

This is a very important passage to understand the painful nature of this experience. Once told the truth – as he conversed with Socrates – the person is left with nothing to rely on. That is because although we have seen that Glaucon and Adeimentus have followed the arguments and agreed by all means, so far, it is not mentioned what happens to them afterwards. It seems like the role of the educator stops at some point and the rest is due to the person involved in this dragging.

            After analyzing the methodology that Socrates is using towards the education of Adeimentus and Glaucon in coherence with the allegory of the cave, it is easier to have an understanding of what Plato is trying to achieve with the characters in the text. It is now appropriate to consider the discussion as a whole to see how Plato uses the irony in Socrates’s discourse on the ideal city and distinguish the reader of the text from the participants of the discussion. The book opens up with the discussion of justice, whether justice is beneficial for the soul or not. Socrates brings in the analogy of the ideal city to explain that justice is good for the individual. The city he is describing can be regarded as another form of tyranny with the philosopher king ruling according to his knowledge in the form of the good, which cannot be understood by any other individual in the city. Although the people have no access to that knowledge, they are willing to give the authority to the philosopher, who in turn separates them from their children, bans them from owning a property and enforces them to do the same job until the end of their lives and still, that form of a city is described as the totality of the happiest demos. What is more absurd is that the participants of the discussion fall short in opposing Socrates that what he describes does not seem to be ideal and at the end they are convinced that it is the ideal city.  Throughout his discussion, Socrates is figured like a magician who is lulling Adeimentus and Glaucon with the story of the ideal city. The reader comes to realize that he/she is also being lulled when Plato starts to give the signals of the collision between Socrates’ ideal city, which is reduced to the will of the philosopher just like in Hesiod – the will of Zeus- and the ideas that are advocated in the allegory of the divided line and the cave. What Socrates claims with those allegories that every individual should be turned to truth, does not hold with what he describes for the situation in Kallipolis. My interpretation for that collision would be that Plato is using irony to provoke some kind of a reaction among his readers against the philosophical inquiry of the ideal city. After introducing the medium to understand the form of the good with the allegory of the sun, he awaits the reader to identify himself with the philosopher in the ideal city, encourage him to break his chains and become the ruler of his own city. In other words, what Plato does is first to show the reader how to use Socratic dialectics and expect the reader to oppose to Socrates for the sake of their own philosophical inquiry.

In that regard, the eventual reach for sunlight is up to the individual in terms of capacity, self-discipline, courage and the other virtues mentioned as necessary inputs for a philosopher to become. It makes much more sense to think this way in terms of perceiving education as a means to get at that very point of self-realization. The following steps should be taken individually on the basis of the truth told and the methodology learnt. In that sense, it is possible to say that Socratic education is not “putting sight into eyes which were blind.” If I am to summarize here what has already been discussed about Socratic education above, it is the education that leads the individual to the point where he starts to question the knowledge already put in him. That is to say, Socratic education serves as a mean for the individual to investigate the aim of his actions rather than act accordingly what he has been told to achieve the good.

After interpreting Socratic education in those terms, what I would like to follow with is the comparison of the form of education in Hesiod’s text Works and Days and Socratic education in contrast. To make that comparison, it is crucial for me to first clarify how I perceive the myth of Er in the end of book 10 to avoid any misunderstanding in the analysis. In book 3, Socrates explains in detail how the stories told by the poets can be harmful for the education of the guardians in Kallipolis. He proposes a strict censorship on the stories to be told to the guardians in their education process, especially the stories on the gods; “When it comes to stories about the gods, then this is apparently the sort of thing which from their earliest childhood people must be told- and not told- if they are to show respect for the gods and their parents, and put a high value on friendship with one another.” In his discussion Socrates emphasizes how imitation, in that case tragedy and comedy, relating to the irrational part of the soul can ruin a blind individual if he accepts what he sees as the truth. What is underlying in this discussion is that poetry is such a powerful device to affect individuals in their choices so that no one else than the philosophers, who have the knowledge of the truth, can appreciate poetry as a work of art. The great value he gives to art is far more obvious in the discussion in book 10 when he chooses to end his discussion with a myth right after explaining how imitation is two removes from the truth. My interpretation of the reason why he chooses the myth of Er to end his discussion would be that he himself as the philosopher who is educating the guardians in his city according to the limitations that he put on their education, I prefer to call Adeimentus and Glaucon as the guardians after reading the whole text because they did not turn out to be the philosophers, uses the power of art to lead them to the good. The myth of Er in that respect is a well chosen story, in which there is no confusion about the gods’ existence and the good way of living in Socratic terms.

Hesiod’s text Works and Days offers a complement to what Socrates is doing in the end of book 10 with the myth of Er by taking the discussion to a metaphysical level that cannot be judged by the mortals, but it offers a contrast in the sense of Socratic education that is explained in the first part of the essay. What Hesiod does in Works and Days is much closer to how education should not be according to Socrates. By telling the myths about Prometheus, Pandora and the five Ages of Man, Hesiod tries to put knowledge into his brother Perses’ soul, who he believes to be blind. His form of education differs from Socrates’s in methodology. While Socrates is using dialectics to improve the eyesight of his interlocutors, Hesiod prefers story telling. Both texts focus on the theme of living a good life, but Hesiod’s approach to goodness and justice does not rely on understanding the true nature of those concepts. Instead, his approach can be regarded as materialistic in order to prove that a just life is better for his brother. Hesiod advises Perses to be just in order to be nourished by the gods:

But to man he has given Justice and she proves to be far the best;

for if a man, of his knowledge, wills to speak justly, to him

Loud-Voiced Zeus grants prosperity;

but to him who will lie by witnesses, swearing falsely,

consciously, and injuring Justice shall fall to sin past cure,

his generation after him is left weaker;

but the generation of the just-swearing man remains better then before.

This passage is to some extent similar to what Socrates is telling with the myth of Er, but the main difference between Socrates’s story and this passage, also the Republic and Works and Days, is that the individual is rewarded or punished by the gods in their lifetimes according to Hesiod and the reward for justice is prosperity, whereas Socrates mentions of a punishment in the afterlife. What Socrates proves in book 1 and 2 is that justice should be applied for the sake of being just, in that sense Hesiod’s advice to Perses on being just to get prosperous would be an unjust behavior according to Socrates and it would offer a contrast in educational terms to turn the blind souls to the truth.   

            Another point that serves as a contrast to Socratic education in Hesiod’s approach to educate his brother according to the good way of living is the matter of individual choice. Hesiod’s educational discourse is formed on the basis that Zeus is the outer authority to whom mortals should obey and make sacrifices. That is to say, human actions are in the control of Zeus and he may be held responsible for both the good and bad in human actions. At this point, what Hesiod does is to draw the territory of the human actions according to an outer authority and come up with conclusions in this context, without leaving enough space for the individual choice. On the contrary, Socrates emphasizes the importance of self-realization and encourages the individual to take the full responsibility of his actions as he derives in Book 2 that “Since god is good, he could not be responsible for everything. Some of the things that happen to men are his responsibility, but most are not; after all, we have many fewer good things than bad things in our lives. We have no reason to hold anyone else responsible for the good things, whereas for the bad things we should look for some other cause, and not blame god.” For Socrates, gods should not be considered as the authority for the mortals, instead they are reflected as the role model for the ultimate goodness. He again refers to the importance of individual choice in the myth of Er, when the souls are choosing a new form for their new life. This shows that individual soul, always in progress, can be directed to apprehend the consequences of his own actions with the proper education and then choose what is best for himself, which will also lead to what is good for everyone around him.

            In conclusion, Hesiod’s Works and Days is in contrast with Socratic education on the basis of reasoning. Since it is claimed that Socratic education is a journey that one takes to better understand his own existence and the true forms of the objects, Hesiod falls short in bringing his reader to that point of self realization because his sheer advices lack the proper reasoning. In the course of the analysis above, one can argue that the approaches of Hesiod, Socrates and Plato to education can be reflected upon the allegory of divided line to show how Hesiod’s advices coincide with the belief part in the divided line, Socratic dialectics with the thinking process and Plato’s artwork Republic, in its completeness, with the understanding part.  It will not be wrong to say that after reading the Republic attentively, the reader, taken to the level of understanding with the presented methodology, is left to answer the questions aroused in the text on justice and goodness in his/her subjective manners. That is to say, Plato achieves his aim by using Socratic education to bring the reader to level where he/she is ready to acquire the true knowledge of things in his/her own understanding.