Devlet (The Republic)

Plato's longest and most widely read dialogue. It is made up of ten books, and its Greek name is Politeia. It is thought to have been written roughly around 375 BC. The book also has an old title, On Justice. I think it is good to keep both in mind together, because the Turkish title "Devlet" (literally "the State") pushes the book's real concern one step further away.

Plato was born in Athens around 427 BC, was a student of Socrates, and founded the Academy around 387. His teacher had been put to death in 399 BC by the decision of an Athenian court. Behind the man who wrote at such length about justice stands a verdict that Plato considered unjust.

The narrator is Socrates, speaking in the first person. Boeckh had placed the scene in 411 BC, while Jowett says that Plato was not strictly bound to the calendar and that the date should not be dwelt on too much.

When I search for "Devlet" on Kitapyurdu, dozens of editions come up. The example I verified is from Say Yayınları: Devlet (Tam Metin), translated by Furkan Akderin, 20 May 2022, 416 pages. I did not put the translations side by side and compare them. I built the section details by following the public domain Jowett translation book by book. The numbers are Plato's book order, not the pages of your edition. I translated the quotations myself.

The book's question

There is a single question: does being just benefit the person who is just? The answer stretches from the founding of the city to the structure of the soul, from the nature of knowledge to what comes after death. It lends itself very easily to being read as a book of politics, but the structure pushes back against this. The city is built from the start so that justice can be read in the soul.

Book One: the hunt for a definition

The scene is the port of Piraeus. Socrates has gone with Glaucon to see the goddess's new festival. On the way back, Polemarchus's slave catches him by the cloak and stops him, and they stay because there is a torch race on horseback that night. At Polemarchus's house the old Cephalus speaks: what makes old age troubled is not age but character. He relates how Sophocles compared being freed from desire to escaping a mad master. Justice, for him, is telling the truth and paying back what you owe. Socrates's counterexample is famous: is it right to give back a weapon left in your keeping to a friend who has lost his mind?

The discussion passes to Polemarchus. Relying on Simonides, he defines justice as doing good to friends and harm to enemies. Socrates proceeds with examples from arts such as medicine and steering a ship and arrives here: harming someone makes them worse, and a just person cannot make anyone worse.

Then Thrasymachus breaks in like a wild beast: justice is the advantage of the stronger. Socrates says that the art of the physician and of the captain looks not to its own advantage but to the good of what it cares for. Thrasymachus argues that the shepherd feeds the sheep for himself and that injustice is profitable. In the end he backs down in the argument and blushes. The book does not end with a sense of victory: Socrates says he still does not know what justice is. As someone with a legal education, this hunt for a definition feels very familiar to me.

Books Two and Three: the ring, the city, the forbidden tales

Glaucon sets up the question again and tells the story of Gyges, the Lydian shepherd. An earthquake splits the ground, and the shepherd finds a giant corpse inside a bronze horse with a gold ring on its finger. When he turns the ring's stone inward, he becomes invisible. He goes to the palace as a messenger, seduces the queen, kills the king and takes the throne. According to Glaucon, whether the just or the unjust man wears the ring, both end up in the same place: no one loves justice for its own sake; people keep to it because they are afraid of getting caught. Adeimantus adds that parents and poets teach justice for the sake of rewards and reputation. Socrates is asked to praise justice independently of these, for what it does to the soul.

Socrates suggests looking for justice first in the city, just as a short-sighted person would read the large letters before the small ones. He builds a simple city that grows out of need and the division of labor. When Glaucon mocks this as a city of pigs, Socrates describes a city in a fever: luxury, the need for land, war, a class of guardians.

The tales are gone over for the education of the guardians. Passages from Homer that show death as terrible or the gods weeping or lying are to be removed; the Lydian and Ionian modes are banned, while the Dorian and Phrygian modes are allowed. In Book Three comes the Phoenician tale, that is, the noble lie: the citizens are children of mother earth and brothers, but some are made of gold, some of silver and some of bronze. Socrates hesitates to tell this tale.

Book Four: the three parts of the soul

Adeimantus says that guardians with no property will be unhappy. Socrates explains that they look to the happiness of the whole city: painting a statue's eyes the wrong color spoils the whole. He finds four virtues in the city. Wisdom lies in the rulers and courage in the soldiers, while moderation spreads through all the classes like a harmony of sounds. Justice is everyone doing their own work.

Then the same test is applied to the soul. Socrates says that one thing cannot be pulled in two opposite directions at the same time and in the same respect. In a man who is thirsty but does not want to drink, what pulls and what holds back must be separate. Three parts emerge: reason, appetite, and a part where anger and courage reside. He shows that anger is separate with the story of Leontius. Leontius wants to look at the corpses at the place of execution, is disgusted, and finally lashes out at his own eyes: "look, then, have your fill of this lovely sight." Justice in the soul is each part doing its own work: reason rules, anger is its ally, appetite is kept in check. Socrates compares this to the health of the soul.

Books Five, Six and Seven: philosopher kings and the cave

Book Five opens with objections that Socrates calls three waves. The first wave is that women receive the same education as the guardians. With the example of the bald and the long-haired shoemaker, he says that if the difference has nothing to do with the work, it does not justify a separate education. The second is shared wives and children for the guardians: marriage is arranged by a rigged lottery, and mothers will not know their children. The biggest wave is the third: unless philosophers become kings, or kings carry the spirit of philosophy, cities "will not be rid of their evils."

Book Six answers why this looks ridiculous. In the ship analogy, the captain is half deaf and half blind, the crew fight over the helm, and the true pilot is mocked and called a stargazer. Then the Good arrives, and Socrates avoids describing it directly and describes its offspring, the sun. The sun gives light to visible things; the Good gives truth and the power of knowing to knowable things. The divided line produces four levels: shadows and reflections, visible objects, mathematical thinking that proceeds from assumptions, and at the very top, dialectic.

Book Seven is the cave. People have been chained since childhood and see the shadows cast on the wall by the fire burning behind them. One is set free; at first his eyes hurt, and slowly he gets used to reflections, objects, the sky and the sun. When he goes back, his eyes are overcome by the dark, the prisoners laugh at him, and they might kill anyone who tries to free them. Education is not putting sight into the eyes but turning the soul in the right direction. The philosophers will not stay up there; they have to go back down. The curriculum is arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, harmony and dialectic. After fifteen years of practical duties, at the age of fifty they will look upon the good and rule. The book even proposes sending everyone older than ten off to the countryside.

Books Eight and Nine: how regimes decay

Five regimes are listed: aristocracy, timocracy based on the love of honor, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny. Each regime has a matching type of person. The timocratic man's mother complains that his father is "half a man." The oligarchic man reins in only his necessary desires and saves money. In democracy freedom knows no limits; fathers are wary of their sons, teachers of their students. The tyrant emerges as the protector of the people, eliminates his rivals and builds a bodyguard army. For the link between democracy and freedom, see the eleutheria diary entry.

Book Nine compares the unruly desire that governs the tyrant's soul to a winged drone. That justice is happier is defended with three proofs. In the second, three pleasures belong to the three parts of the soul: wisdom, honor, gain. The philosopher is the best judge because he has tasted all three. The last separates true pleasure from its counterfeit, and the king comes out 729 times more content than the tyrant. The soul is pictured as a many-headed beast, a lion and a small human. The unjust man feeds the beast and starves the human. There is a pattern of the city laid up in heaven: whoever wishes can use it to order their own life.

Book Ten: poetry and Er

Socrates turns to poetry. He gives the example of the three beds: the essence of the bed, the bed the carpenter makes, the image the painter draws. The poet makes an imitation of an imitation, three steps away from the truth. He asks which city, which war, which invention we owe to Homer. Poetry feeds the side of the soul that is open to feelings like pity and anger. Still, he finds the quarrel between philosophy and poetry an old one and grants poetry the right to return if it proves that it is useful.

Then he moves on to the immortality of the soul: each thing is destroyed by its own evil, injustice does not destroy the soul, so the soul is immortal. The book ends with the story of Er. Er, a soldier from Pamphylia, is found alive on the funeral pyre after twelve days and tells what he saw. The dead are judged, Lachesis, Clotho and Atropos turn the spindle of Ananke, and the souls choose their next lives themselves. A prophet says "virtue is free"; the responsibility lies with the one who chooses. Orpheus chooses the swan, Agamemnon the eagle; Odysseus comes last and chooses the quiet life of an ordinary person. Er is not allowed to drink from the river of forgetfulness and is sent back.

Its strongest points

For me the strongest is the honesty of the question. Glaucon's ring argument is not a cheap portrait of a villain. The book leaves this objection standing to the very end, and then tries to build the answer from inside the soul.

The tripartite soul still works, too. It is a description of an inner life in which reason, appetite and anger clash. Plato says nothing about ADHD or neuroscience, and I do not read this as evidence. I see it as an old mirror to look into while thinking about executive functions. The man who is thirsty and does not drink and the person who knows and still cannot do it are asking the same question. I worked through this discussion separately in the akrasia diary entry.

And the cave. Turning toward the truth hurts, and people do not believe the one who turns. A single image that says education is not putting knowledge in but changing direction does this much work.

Weak points and criticisms

Karl Popper, in Açık Toplum ve Düşmanları (The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945), counts the book as a totalitarian text: censorship, the noble lie, a class order and the planning of reproduction. Readers such as Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, on the other hand, say that Socrates may be ironic and that the city built in words is not a plan but an exercise in learning. I think both have to be taken seriously together. The book openly proposes censorship and the noble lie, and the irony argument does not erase this.

The city-soul analogy is also contested. Julia Annas says that Socrates did not take the political project as seriously as the moral one. David Sachs's objection is sharper: Socrates defends the health of the soul, but it is not clear why a well-ordered soul would keep a person away from theft and murder. The question is "does being just pay," while the answer becomes "having an ordered soul pays."

I also find the argument built for the immortality of the soul the weakest link in the book. It makes the soul indestructible only within its own definition.

Who it is for, and who it is not

For anyone who thinks hard about justice, freedom and education. Especially for those who wonder whether the problem lies in the system or in the person's own inner order. You do not have to read it from start to finish: Books One and Two, Book Four, Book Seven and the end of Book Ten are enough.

It is not for someone looking for a quick political theory. It is a dialogue that demands patience and circles within itself.

Its place on the shelf

Nikomakhos'a Etik (Nicomachean Ethics) can be read as the answer of Plato's student: Aristotle builds character out of habit. The idea of measure I wrote about in the sophrosyne diary entry is also a step away from the image of harmony in the Republic. Sisifos Söyleni (The Myth of Sisyphus), on the other hand, is the voice of someone who leaves the cave and cannot find meaning. For the notes of an emperor often cited as a real-life example of the philosopher-ruler idea, there is Kendime Düşünceler (Meditations). And for the noble lie and the planning of reproduction, Cesur Yeni Dünya (Brave New World) makes an interesting side reading.

Closing

I was not convinced by the plan of the city, and I do not have to be. What remains standing in the book for me is the question of whether justice begins first in the soul. I am skeptical of Plato's answer, not of his question.