NICHOLAS D. SMITHIt will not come as news to hear that the Republic has been read in
many, sometimes radically, different ways. On the basis of worries such
a s t hose I have already expressed, some inter preters have arg ued t hat we
should understand the Republic as a kind of self-deconstructing comedy,^3
whose arguments and specifi c prescriptions should not be understood
as spoudai`o~. This very radical understanding of the work, however,
confounds the way the work has been read since antiquity—book 2 of
Aristotle’s Politics plainly suggests that if Plato had intended his Republic
as a joke, his best student didn’t “get it.” Throughout most of the history
of interpretation of this text, as far as we know of it,^4 the Republic has
been understood as a serious work of political philosophy.^5
In this essay, I suggest a somewhat different way of understanding
Plato’s greatest work. In the view I propose, Plato’s work is intended nei-
ther as humor (though it is sometimes funny) nor as a straightforward
blueprint for political reform, but as an educational work, whose edu-
cational methodology is best understood in the light of the discussion
of mathematical methodology that we fi nd in the work itself. In brief,
the Republic presents the reader with a series of images that are not at all
intended in the imitative way Plato disparages in book 10, but to be used
as images that provoke thought (diavnoia), in much the same way as Plato
describes the proper use of images in the quotation with which I began.^6
The Uses and Abuses of Images
As I said in the introduction, Plato compares cognitive contact with im-
ages with dreaming, and for the most part the comparison is not at all
intended to be favorable. But not all dreams are mere phantasms (see
599a2): in book 7, he has Socrates credit those engaged in mathemati-
cal studies with “dreaming about what is” (533b8– c1), for although their
reliance on assumptions and images prevents them from achieving
the “clear waking vision” of the Forms only dialecticians can achieve,
their method does allow them to make some contact with the really real
(533b6 – 7). In fact, we sometimes fi nd that Plato prefers to compare this
use of images not to being asleep and dreaming, but to the process of
awakening from doxastic slumbers:
This, then, is just what I was trying to explain just now, about things
that are provocative of thought and those that are not, where provoca-
tive things are those that lead to perceptions that are at the same time