Unless, said I, either philosophers become kings in our states or those whom we now call our kings and rulers take to the pursuit of philosophy seriously and adequately, and there is a conjunction of these two things, political power and philosophical intelligence, while the motley horde of the natures who at present pursue either apart from the other are compulsorily excluded, there can be no cessation of troubles, dear Glaucon, for our states, nor, I fancy, for the human race either. Nor, until this happens, will this constitution which we have been expounding in theory ever be put into practice within the limits of possibility and see the light of the sun. But this is the thing that has made me so long shrink from speaking out, because I saw that it would be a very paradoxical saying. For it is not easy to see that there is no other way of happiness either for private or public life.
Whereupon he said, Socrates, after hurling at us such an utterance and statement as that, you must expect to be attacked by a great multitude of our men of light and leading, who forthwith will, so to speak, cast off their garments and strip and, snatching the first weapon that comes to hand, rush at you with might and main, prepared to do dreadful deeds. And if you don't find words to defend yourself against them, and escape their assault, then to be scorned and flouted will in very truth be the penalty you will have to pay.
And isn't it you, said I, that have brought this upon me and are to blame?
And a good thing, too, said he, but I won't let you down, and will defend you with what I can. I can do so with my good will and my encouragement, and perhaps I might answer your questions more suitably than another. So, with such an aid to back you, try to make it plain to the doubters that the truth is as you say.
I must try, I replied, since you proffer so strong an alliance. I think it requisite, then, if we are to escape the assailants you speak of, that we should define for them whom we mean by the philosophers, who we dare to say ought to be our rulers. When these are clearly discriminated it will be possible to defend ourselves by showing that to them by their very nature belong the study of philosophy and political leadership, while it befits the other sort to let philosophy alone and to follow their leader.
It is high time, he said, to produce your definition.
Come, then, follow me on this line, if we may in some fashion or other explain our meaning.
Proceed, he said.
Must I remind you, then, said I, or do you remember, that when we affirm that a man is a lover of something, it must be apparent that he is fond of all of it? It will not do to say that some of it he likes and some does not.
I think you will have to remind me, he said, for I don't apprehend at all.
That reply, Glaucon, said I, befitted another rather than you. It does not become a lover to forget that all adolescents in some sort sting and stir the amorous lover of youth and appear to him deserving of his attention and desirable. Is not that your 'reaction' to the fair? One, because his nose is tiptilted, you will praise as piquant, the beak of another you pronounce right royal, the intermediate type you say strikes the harmonious mean, the swarthy are of manly aspect, the white are children of the gods divinely fair, and as for honey-hued, do you suppose the very word is anything but the euphemistic invention of some lover who can feel no distaste for sallowness when it accompanies the blooming time of youth? And, in short, there is no pretext you do not allege and there is nothing you shrink from saying to justify you in not rejecting any who are in the bloom of their prime.
If it is your pleasure, he said, to take me as your example of this trait in lovers, I admit it for the sake of the argument.
Again, said I, do you not observe the same thing in the lovers of wine? They welcome every wine on any pretext.
They do, indeed.
And so I take it you have observed that men who are covetous of honor, if they can't get themselves elected generals, are captains of a company. And if they can't be honored by great men and dignitaries, are satisfied with honor from little men and nobodies. But honor they desire and must have.
Yes, indeed.
Admit, then, or reject my proposition. When we say a man is keen about something, shall we say that he has an appetite for the whole class or that he desires only a part and a part not?
The whole, he said.
Then the lover of wisdom, too, we shall affirm, desires all wisdom, not a part and a part not.
Certainly.
The student, then, who is finical about his studies, especially when he is young and cannot yet know by reason what is useful and what is not, we shall say is not a lover of learning or a lover of wisdom, just as we say that one who is dainty about his food is not really hungry, has not an appetite for food, and is not a lover of food, but a poor feeder.
We shall rightly say so.
But the one who feels no distaste in sampling every study, and who attacks his task of learning gladly and cannot get enough of it, him we shall justly pronounce the lover of wisdom, the philosopher, shall we not?
To which Glaucon replied, You will then be giving the name to a numerous and strange band, for all the lovers of spectacles are what they are, I fancy, by virtue of their delight in learning something. And those who always want to hear some new thing are a very queer lot to be reckoned among philosophers. You couldn't induce them to attend a serious debate or any such entertainment, but as if they had farmed out their ears to listen to every chorus in the land, they run about to all the Dionysiac festivals, never missing one, either in the towns or in the country villages. Are we to designate all these, then, and similar folk and all the practitioners of the minor arts as philosophers?
Not at all, I said, but they do bear a certain likeness to philosophers.
Whom do you mean, then, by the true philosophers?
Those for whom the truth is the spectacle of which they are enamored, said I.
Right again, said he, but in what sense do you mean it?
It would be by no means easy to explain it to another, I said, but I think that you will grant me this.
What?
That since the fair and honorable is the opposite of the base and ugly, they are two.
Of course.
And since they are two, each is one.
That also.
And in respect of the just and the unjust, the good and the bad, and all the ideas or forms, the same statement holds, that in itself each is one, but that by virtue of their communion with actions and bodies and with one another they present themselves everywhere, each as a multiplicity of aspects.
Right, he said.
This, then, said I, is my division. I set apart and distinguish those of whom you were just speaking, the lovers of spectacles and the arts, and men of action, and separate from them again those with whom our argument is concerned and who alone deserve the appellation of philosophers or lovers of wisdom.
What do you mean? he said.
The lovers of sounds and sights, I said, delight in beautiful tones and colors and shapes and in everything that art fashions out of these, but their thought is incapable of apprehending and taking delight in the nature of the beautiful in itself.
Why, yes, he said, that is so.
And on the other hand, will not those be few who would be able to approach beauty itself and contemplate it in and by itself?
They would, indeed.
He, then, who believes in beautiful things, but neither believes in beauty itself nor is able to follow when someone tries to guide him to the knowledge of it--do you think that his life is a dream or a waking? Just consider. Is not the dream state, whether the man is asleep or awake, just this--the mistaking of resemblance for identity?
I should certainly call that dreaming, he said.
Well, then, take the opposite case, the man whose thought recognizes a beauty in itself, and is able to distinguish that self-beautiful and the things that participate in it, and neither supposes the participants to be it nor it the participants--is his life, in your opinion, a waking or a dream state?
He is very much awake, he replied.
Could we not rightly, then, call the mental state of the one as knowing, knowledge, and that of the other as opining, opinion?
Assuredly.
Suppose, now, he who we say opines but does not know should be angry and challenge our statement as not true--can we find any way of soothing him and gently winning him over, without telling him too plainly that he is not in his right mind?
We must try, he said.
Come, then, consider what we are to say to him, or would you have us question him in this fashion--premising that if he knows anything, nobody grudges it him, but we should be very glad to see him knowing something--but tell us this, Does he who knows know something or nothing? Do you reply in his behalf.
I will reply, he said, that he knows something.
Is it something that is or is not?
That is. How could that which is not be known?
We are sufficiently assured of this, then, even if we should examine it from every point of view, that that which entirely is is entirely knowable, and that which in no way is is in every way unknowable?
Most sufficiently.
Good. If a thing, then, is so conditioned as both to be and not to be, would it not lie between that which absolutely and unqualifiedly is and that which in no way is?
Between.
Then since knowledge pertains to that which is and ignorance of necessity to that which is not, for that which lies between we must seek for something between nescience and science, if such a thing there be.
By all means.
Is there a thing which we call opinion?
Surely.
Is it a different faculty from science or the same?
A different.
Then opinion is set over one thing and science over another, each by virtue of its own distinctive power or faculty.
That is so.
May we say, then, that science is naturally related to that which is, to know that and how that which is is? But rather, before we proceed, I think we must draw the following distinctions.
What ones?
Shall we say that faculties, powers, abilities are a class of entities by virtue of which we and all other things are able to do what we or they are able to do? I mean that sight and hearing, for example, are faculties, if so be that you understand the class or type that I am trying to describe.
I understand, he said.
Hear, then, my notion about them. In a faculty I cannot see any color or shape or similar mark such as those on which in many other cases I fix my eyes in discriminating in my thought one thing from another. But in the case of a faculty I look to one thing only--that to which it is related and what it effects, and it is in this way that I come to call each one of them a faculty, and that which is related to the same thing and accomplishes the same thing I call the same faculty, and that to another I call other. How about you, what is your practice?
The same, he said.
To return, then, my friend, said I, to science or true knowledge, do you say that it is a faculty and a power, or in what class do you put it?
Into this, he said, the most potent of all faculties.
And opinion--shall we assign it to some other class than faculty?
By no means, he said, for that by which we are able to opine is nothing else than the faculty of opinion.
But not long ago you agreed that science and opinion are not identical.
How could any rational man affirm the identity of the infallible with the fallible?
Excellent, said I, and we are plainly agreed that opinion is a different thing from scientific knowledge.
Yes, different.
Each of them, then, since it has a different power, is related to a different object.
Of necessity.
Science, I presume, to that which is, to know the condition of that which is?
Yes.
But opinion, we say, opines.
Yes.
Does it opine the same thing that science knows, and will the knowable and the opinable be identical, or is that impossible?
Impossible by our admissions, he said. If different faculties are naturally related to different objects and both opinion and science are faculties, but each different from the other, as we say--these admissions do not leave place for the identity of the knowable and the opinable.
Then, if that which is a knowable, something other than that which is would be the opinable.
Something else.
Does it opine that which is not, or is it impossible even to opine that which is not? Reflect. Does not he who opines bring his opinion to bear upon something or shall we reverse ourselves and say that it is possible to opine, yet opine nothing?
That is impossible.
Then he who opines opines some one thing?
Yes.
But surely that which is not could not be designated as some one thing, but most rightly as nothing at all.
Yes.
To that which is not we of necessity assigned nescience, and to that which is, knowledge.
Rightly, he said.
Then neither that which is nor that which is not is the object of opinion.
It seems not.
Then opinion would be neither nescience nor knowledge.
So it seems.
Is it then a faculty outside of these, exceeding either knowledge in lucidity or ignorance in obscurity?
It is neither.
But do you deem opinion something darker than knowledge but brighter than ignorance?
Much so, he said.
And does it lie within the boundaries of the two?
Yes.
Then opinion would be between the two.
Most assuredly.
Were we not saying a little while ago that if anything should turn up such that it both is and is not, that sort of thing would lie between that which purely and absolutely is and that which wholly is not, and that the faculty correlated with it would be neither science nor nescience, but that which should appear to hold a place correspondingly between nescience and science.
Right.
And now there has turned up between these two the thing that we call opinion.
There has.
It would remain, then, as it seems, for us to discover that which partakes of both, of to be and not to be, and that could not be rightly designated either in its exclusive purity, so that, if it shall be discovered, we may justly pronounce it to be the opinable, thus assigning extremes to extremes and the intermediate to the intermediate. Is not that so?
It is.
This much premised, let him tell me, I will say, let him answer me, that good fellow who does not think there is a beautiful in itself or any idea of beauty in itself always remaining the same and unchanged, but who does believe in many beautiful things--the lover of spectacles, I mean, who cannot endure to hear anybody say that the beautiful is one and the just one, and so of other things--and this will be our question. My good fellow, is there any one of these many fair and honorable things that will not sometimes appear ugly and base? And of the just things, that will not seem unjust? And of the pious things, that will not seem impious?
No, it is inevitable, he said, that they would appear to be both beautiful in a way and ugly, and so with all the other things you asked about.
And again, do the many double things appear any the less halves than doubles?
None the less.
And likewise of the great and the small things, the light and the heavy things--will they admit these predicates any more than their opposites?
No, he said, each of them will always hold of, partake of, both.
Then is each of these multiples rather than it is not that which one affirms it to be?
They are like those jesters who palter with us in a double sense at banquets, he replied, and resemble the children's riddle about the eunuch and his hitting of the bat--with what and as it sat on what they signify that he struck it. For these things too equivocate, and it is impossible to conceive firmly any one of them to be or not to be or both or neither.
Do you know what to do with them, then? said I. And can you find a better place to put them than that midway between existence or essence and the not to be? For we shall surely not discover a darker region than not-being that they should still more not be, nor a brighter than being that they should still more be.
Most true, he said.
We would seem to have found, then, that the many conventions of the many about the fair and honorable and other things are tumbled about in the mid-region between that which is not and that which is in the true and absolute sense.
We have so found it.
But we agreed in advance that if anything of that sort should be discovered, it must be denominated opinable, not knowable, the wanderer between being caught by the faculty that is betwixt and between.
We did.
We shall affirm, then, that those who view many beautiful things but do not see the beautiful itself and are unable to follow another's guidance to it, and many just things, but not justice itself, and so in all cases--we shall say that such men have opinions about all things, but know nothing of the things they opine.
Of necessity.
And, on the other hand, what of those who contemplate the very things themselves in each case, ever remaining the same and unchanged--shall we not say that they know and do not merely opine?
That, too, necessarily follows.
Shall we not also say that the one welcomes to his thought and loves the things subject to knowledge and the other those to opinion? Do we not remember that we said that those loved and regarded tones and beautiful colors and the like, but they could not endure the notion of the reality of the beautiful itself?
We do remember.
Shall we then offend their ears if we call them doxophilists rather than philosophers and will they be very angry if we so speak?
Not if they heed my counsel, he said, for to be angry with truth is not lawful.
Then to those who in each and every kind welcome the true being, lovers of wisdom and not lovers of opinion is the name we must give.
By all means.
END OF BOOK V