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

important truth. In the present passage, he describes how enlightened craftsmen
such as painters, weavers, and architects are to join the poets and musicians in
creating for the guardians-in-training an ideally beautiful environment; “the
influence exerted by those fine works” is to affect the senses “like a healthy
breeze,” guiding them “from earliest childhood,” and without their being aware of
the fact, “into being similar to, friendly toward, and concordant with the beauty of
reason.” The idea is that a person can internalize “the beauty of reason” as a result
of growing up in an environment pervaded by it. Having acquired the right tastes
and distastes – a certain trained sensitivity to the presence or absence of beauty –
while “he is still young, before he is able to grasp the reason . . . he will welcome
the reason when it comes and recognize it easily because of its kinship with
himself.” Socrates uses an analogy to hint at what he means here by being “able
to grasp the reason.” Just as one doesn’t really know how to read until one knows
the letters and how they can be combined to make words and phrases, one is not
truly educated in music and poetry until one knows “the different forms of
temperance, courage, generosity, high-mindedness, and all their kindred, and their
opposites too, which are carried around everywhere,” and can “see them in the
things in which they are, both themselves and their images.” This is noteworthy as
the first statement in the Republic of a distinction that will ultimately be crucial to
understanding Socrates’ reply to Glaucon’s challenge. We will have occasion
later to consider it in greater detail, when it is set out more fully. For now, it is
perhaps enough to see two things: first, that Socrates distinguishes between
“forms” of things and “images” of things; and second, that Socrates thinks the
knowledge of forms plays a role in the value judgments of a properly educated
person similar to the role played in reading by a person’s knowledge of letters, i.e.,
a fundamental role. But knowledge of the forms is for a later stage of education.
At present, the guardians-in-training are to acquire an appreciation of beauty at the
level, not of reasoning, but of feelings. They are to be surrounded by beautiful
things, and encouraged to love what is beautiful. Socrates describes and
commends in this context a kind of interpersonal relationship that has at times
been called “platonic love,” a drawing together in love of persons whose bodies
and souls “share in the same pattern” of beauty. But it is a love that is not to suffer
distortion through the “excessive pleasure” of sexual intercourse. However