On Getting to the End of Plato's Republic

Phew! That was hard work. Four hundred and sixteen pages. I finished this morning, having started reading it over two months ago. And this is my second attempt; my first bash (last autumn) ended about a quarter of the way into the book.

BUT IT WAS WORTH IT!!

As Alfred North Whitehead wrote in 1929, "...the European philosophical tradition is ... a series of footnotes to Plato.” Plato posed the foundational questions and set out the conceptual map, over which later philosophers have argued; answering him, modifying him – rejecting him even, but hardly ever ignoring him. And so I set out, determined to read such a crucial text. 

This particular book, my son has reminded me today, spent most of its life in my parents' downstairs lavatory. I guess it served to impress guests, signalling intellectual pretensions, and it might have been something my mother dipped into now and then while seated on the throne. It was neither annotated (as many of my father's science books are) nor even visibly thumbed.

The Republic is part of an anthology, The Essential Plato (with introduction by Alain de Botton), a 1999 reprint of the Victorian translation, by Benjamin Jowett. I now realise that this is not the easiest way into Plato's work. Jowett made zero effort to make the original Greek easy to read, leaving immense sentences that stretch on sometimes for half a page as single chunks. Rather than breaking them down into less ponderous prose, Jowett's text gives off the air of a Victorian mind trying hard to appear lofty. You drift away in successive subordinate clauses, searching for the sentence's principal verb.

Yet Jowett's translation is to Plato what King James Version is to the Bible – it's the version that many generations of Britain's educated elite cut its teeth on while reading the Greats or PPE at Oxford.

So I read the whole book out loud (another reason it took so long – I never took it with me on the train). I read it so that it would make sense to me. If I failed to get Plato's point, I'd re-read the paragraph. Aloud. And as I did so, it dawned on my why my studies at school and university were not as effective as they should have been – I had so often skipped the hard bits. At the meta-level, often while reading Plato, I was conscious of my mind beginning to wander off. So I read slowly, around six pages a day on average, compared to the 20 or so pages a day of previous books I'd read this year. Also, I read it with pencil in hand, making notes in the margins, underlining points I considered important and flagging up with asterisks the key ideas. 

Another thing that irked me throughout was the fact that though ostensibly The Republic is in the form of a dialogue between Socrates (the character through whom Plato speaks) and his followers, the actual 'dialogue' is mostly Socrates' listeners saying things like "Yes" and "True" and "Exactly" and "By all means" to just about everything that Socrates says. With the exception of Thrasymachus, who puts up a vigorous argument against Socrates' (Plato's) point of view in Book 1, everyone else comes across as a cypher, a mere nodding yes-man. The reader yearns for a response such as "up to a point" or "only in some cases" or "that's a bit of a sweeping generalisation, Socrates!" This is no dramatic debate among equals, no challenges, not a true dialogue; rather, it comes across as a narrative device, a framework upon which Plato hangs his ideas.

Having said that, these 416 pages contain ideas that have shaped our world to a remarkable degree. 

In my next post, I shall cover what Plato actually wrote 2,400 years ago, and why his thinking on human psychology, politics and spirituality remains so utterly relevant today. And why I so frequently was writing 'Trump!' and 'Putin!' in the margins.

This time last year:
The platform is in working order (or not)

This time two years ago:
Anatomy of a Moment

This time three years ago:
Ego – self-consciousness – pure consciousness

This time seven years ago:
The Day the Forecasters Got It Wrong

This time eight years ago:
Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time

This time 12 years ago:
W-wa Wola became W-wa Zachodnia Platform 8 two years ago today 

This time 13 years ago:
From yellow to white – dandelions go to seed
[2026: this happened two weeks ago]

This time 16 years ago:
The good topiarist

This time 17 years ago:
Wettest. May. Ever.

This time 18 years ago:
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[My last visit to Zakopane – I've not been back since]