REPUBLIC(BOOKVII) 123
de519abcde520athat’s not able to turn away from darkness toward the light in any other way than along
with the whole body, needs to be turned around along with the whole soul, away from
what’s fleeting, until it becomes able to endure gazing at what is and at the brightest of
what is, and this, we’re claiming, is the good. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“Then there would be an art to this very thing,” I said, “this turning around, hav-
ing to do with the way the soul would be most easily and effectively redirected, not an
art of implanting sight in it, but of how to contrive that for someone who has sight, but
doesn’t have it turned the right way or looking at what it needs to.”
“That seems likely,” he said.
“Then the other virtues said to belong to a soul probably tend to be near the things
belonging to the body, since they’re not present in the being of the soul before they’ve
been inculcated by habits and practice, but the virtue involving understanding, more
than all, attains to being something more divine, as it seems, which never loses its
power, but by the way it’s turned becomes either useful and beneficial or useless and
harmful. Or haven’t you ever reflected about the people said to be depraved but wise,
how penetrating a gaze their little souls have and how sharply they discern the things
they’re turned toward, since they don’t have poor sight but force it to serve vice, so that
the more sharply it sees, that much more evil it accomplishes?”
“Very much so,” he said.
“But surely,” I said, “if, straight from childhood, this tendency of such a nature had
been curtailed by having the edges knocked off that have an affinity with becoming, like
lead weights that, through eating and the pleasures and greediness involved in such things,
get to be growths on the soul that turn its sight excessively downward, and if, freed from
them, it was turned toward things that are true, this same power of these same people would
have seen them too most sharply, just as it sees the ones it’s now turned toward.”
“Very likely,” he said.
“And what about this?” I said. “Isn’t it likely, even necessary from what’s been
said before, that those who are uneducated and lacking experience with truth could
never adequately manage a city, and neither could those who’ve been allowed to devote
all their time to education—the former because they don’t have any one goal in life that
they need to aim at in doing all the things they do in private and in public, and the latter
because they wouldn’t willingly engage in action, believing they’d taken up residence
in the Isles of the Blessed while still living?”
“True,” he said.
“So our job as founders,” I said, “is to require the best natures to get to the study
we were claiming earlier is the greatest thing, to see the good as well as to climb the
path up to it, and when, having climbed up, they’ve seen it sufficiently, not to allow
what they’re now permitted to do.”
“What in particular?”
“To stay there,” I said, “and not be willing to come back down among those pris-
oners or take part beside them in their labors and honors, the more frivolous ones or
even the more serious.”
“What?” he said. “Are we going to do them an injustice and make them live worse
when it’s possible for them to live better?”
“My friend,” I said, “you let it slip back out of your memory that this is no concern
of the law, for some one class of people in a city to be exceptionally well off, but that it
contrive things so that this arises in the city as a whole, by harmonizing the citizens
through persuasion and compulsion and making them contribute to one another a share of