NICHOLAS D. SMITHexcept that unlike Thrasymachus, Socrates does not regard the advan-
tage, once justice is correctly understood, as belonging exclusively to the
stronger, for it goes to everyone, strong and weak, in the kallipolis. Only
Thrasymachus’ claim that injustice is more advantageous than justice
fails to provide a likeness of Socrates’ later hypotheses.
So we also fi nd that Plato uses images, whose inadequacies are
noted, so that we can move from them to those better conceptions, of
which the former turn out to be mere images. These, too, come to be
revealed as only images as we climb Plato’s ladder of images so as to
approach those realities that are originals only, and not themselves im-
ages. But the Republic never takes us entirely to this point—it is, instead,
a book of images.
This understanding of the Republic has important consequences
for how we are to understand not only Plato’s methodology in present-
ing his ideas to his readers, but also what we should conceive as his
overall purpose for the work. As I noted at the outset, two of the most
widely shared conceptions of the Republic either dismiss its seriousness
altogether or else take its recommendations quite literalistically for pro-
posed political practice. In the view I have presented, neither of these
conceptions is correct. The non-serious reading of the Republic may be
credited at least on some issues with noticing that Plato’s images are dis-
turbingly fl awed. Far from showing that Plato was not serious about his
images, however, we can now see that such fl aws are inherent to images,
and that the kind of critique of these images we get from such scholars
(and later, in Aristotle’s own critique) is actually an essential part of
the correct use of images—for it is only because such images present
both the characteristic they are intended to present (such as justice) and
the opposite characteristic that they serve well to “awaken thought” as the
kind of provocative images this method requires (523b9– 524d5). But
this does not mean that the presentation of the image is mere play or
humor, for the project of using the image to move to the original of that
image is entirely a serious one.
The fl aw in the standard interpretation of the Republic is one that
is equal but the opposite of the one that infects the non-serious view.
For as a book of images, Plato certainly did not intend us to take those
images in the sort of wooden or literalistic way that would harden their
contours into moral or political dogma. The images of justice that Plato
presents, I claim, are intended to serve as methodological “provocatives”
whose proper use takes them seriously as images, which is to say as pro-
vocatively fl awed approximations of our real intellectual goals, rather
than as fl awless guides to action in and of themselves. The failure of the
traditional interpretation of the Republic is that it takes Plato’s images too