The Intelligent Troglodyte’s Guide to Plato’s Republic, 2016a

70 Completing the Education of the Rulers
See 539d-540c. People training to be rulers will spend roughly five years, from
about age thirty to thirty-five, in dialectical inquiry (this coming on the heels of
ten years or so of formal mathematical study). Then, for fifteen years, they will
“go down into the cave again,” and “take command in matters of war and the other
offices suitable for young people, so that they won’t be inferior to the others in
experience.” Socrates appears to have in mind something like a rotating
internship, enabling the rulers-in-training to learn firsthand how the various jobs in
the city are performed, what sorts of people succeed best at what jobs, what
problems various workers face, what hopes and fears they have, and so on. This
fifteen year internship studying the world of particulars compliments the fifteen
previous years focussed on the intelligible realm. Finally, around age fifty, “those
who have survived the tests and are entirely best in every practical task and every
science must be led at last to the end and compelled to lift up the radiant light of
their souls, and look toward what itself provides light for everything.” Having
come to understand the form of the good, they are to rule.
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Is practical experience necessary for coming to understand the form of the
good?
Does it make sense to suppose that a philosopher would have to be
“compelled” in the end to turn his or her understanding to the form of the
good? Is there any reason a lover of wisdom might hesitate and need a
gentle push?
What might Socrates mean when he says that the souls of the philosophers
have a “radiant light”?
If what it is for a soul to be just is for each part of the soul to do its proper
job, and if the proper job of the rational part of the soul is to rule wisely, and
if wisdom requires knowledge of the form of the good, and if this
knowledge is achieved only by philosophers, then it follows that
philosophers are the only truly just people. Can this be so?