MARK MOESgood older people at the wrong time (ajpistw`n para; kairo;n, 409c7– d1;
recall that the kairov~ is the appropriate time for medical intervention)
and thereby unable ever to trust a teacher or friend enough to learn
from him. One’s personal interactions become tainted by one’s own in-
justice, and one is barred from the kind of trustful intimacy that only a
pure soul can experience. Just as the state of one’s body conditions the
way one responds to foods and other stimuli, so the state of one’s mind
and will conditions the way one responds to proposals and exhortations
of one’s teachers and friends. Socrates is bringing home to a young and
ambitious Glaucon that virtue is not a constraining disposition that lim-
its an agent’s fl ourishing, but the proper functioning that is necessary,
among other things, for the activity essential to human nature of learn-
ing from one’s teachers and friends.^41
Another clue to a sound understanding of Socrates’ strategy in
this passage was discussed in the second section of this paper—that it is
a part of the concept of virtue that a virtuous person lives well because
he is st rongly resist ant to v ice. A s we ment ioned earlier, one way in which
one might be resistant to vice is that one might know in advance what
bad infl uences one must be on guard against. Wise men know the symp-
toms, courses, and causes of the forms of vice. Young people who trust
their elders and their literary traditions can learn these from them with-
out having to live through debilitating periods of vice that, even in the
fortunate cases, at least greatly hinder and slow down their intellectual
and moral development.^42 Such seems to be a main lesson of the Myth
of Er.^43 This is why Socrates says that “virtue, if natural endowments are
improved by education [ajreth; de; fuvsew~ paideuomevnh~], will in time get
hold of knowledge both of itself and of vice” (409d8– 10).
People are not born virtuous. So what could Socrates mean by the
natural endowments that need to be educated? He must be referring,
among other things, to that e[rw~ or will to truth and goodness men-
tioned earlier, that e[rw~ that when properly guided leads to the gesta-
tion of true virtue at the core of the personality, but that often goes
awry when internal or external conditions are unsuitable for its proper
formation and expression. We noted earlier that Socrates draws con-
nections among e[rw~ and health, knowledge, and vision. These connec-
tions are also relevant to understanding Socrates’ way with Glaucon in
the passage now under consideration. For there is in a man a structure
of desire and interest that directs the attention of his intellect to some
aspects of things and away from other aspects of things which he does
not w ish to see or is unable to see. Bot h intellect ua l and mor a l v irt ues in-
volve right apprehension of value or the good, and this apprehension is
only possible for someone with well-formed desires and interests. Mere
argument by itself is not necessarily suffi cient for imparting vision of