Over the last three months, I had the incredible privilege of participating in one of Dr. Michael Millerman’s courses on Plato’s Republic. For me personally, it felt like something of an obligation, since last year, Jack Donovan and I had done our own 8-part walkthrough of the Republic. I was immensely proud of that series, and described it to a number of friends and acquaintances as “the best walkthrough of the Republic online… unless Dr. Millerman has something behind a paywall I don’t know about.”

As it turned, out, he did.

The course was a 10-week read-through, with accompanying lectures and analysis from Dr. Millerman. Millerman is a strong Straussian, and a lot of his analytic interpretation is re-iteration and expansion upon what fellow Straussian Allan Bloom writes in his interpretive essay, which is appended to his excellent translation of the Republic. The Jowett translation is also good, but it omits and euphemizes a few passages, whereas Bloom is direct and literal, in a way that lends itself — as Bloom himself perfectly puts it, in his preface — to the “serious student” who “may be much better endowed than the translators” in understanding ambiguous or cryptic language… of which there is plenty, in Plato’s works.

But this is not to say that Plato is difficult to read. At a higher level, he certainly is, but unlike much of philosophy which is didactic and technical, Plato writes in a playful and, in general, very accessible style. Whereas a modern philosopher might accuse someone of making a “straw-man” argument (a phrase which is easy to forget as being technical jargon), Plato simply says:

“…You take hold of the argument in the way you can work it the most harm.”

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But aside from its plainness of meaning (generally…), Plato is also incredibly vivid, in his metaphors and illustrative allegories, which are layered and interwoven in a manner that is more dazzling in its complexity and beauty with every read. Translators that over-interpret the text in the translation itself often risk losing this complexity and beauty, in favor of an ease of reading which is — comparatively speaking — more or less already there.

In addition to the reading and the interpretive videos, there were also writing assignments for each ‘book’ (chapter), which Dr. Millerman responded to with personalized videos, guiding the student towards a deeper or better understanding.

And, of course, perhaps most enjoyably (for me) were the open discussion calls where we worked through our questions, problems, opinions, and observations with the text, with the guiding help of Dr. Millerman.

Due to the personalized nature the coursework, and the different starting points every student was coming from, in their own journey through (or into) Plato, it is hard to give a kind of summarizing experience of the course itself. I can only say that it was immensely worthwhile to me, for reasons I’ll get into shortly.

But to make this somewhat worthwhile for someone who hasn’t yet read the Republic, allow me to offer a brief and simplified summary of Plato’s magnum opus:

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The Republic begins with Socrates and his young friend, Glaucon, being apprehended on their way back from a festival, and taken to a house party. There, Socrates asks an older friend how aging has treated him, and the friend says that aging isn’t so bad for the just man. When Socrates asks him what ‘justice’ actually means, the old man simply laughs and departs, leaving the younger men to take up the discussion. After simple, conventional notions are invoked and refuted, a sophist stands up and says that justice is “nothing other than the advantage of the stronger.”

The sophist is eventually twisted up into verbal knots and humiliated, but the young men are unimpressed, and ask for a further exploration. Since Socrates says that justice is not just an instrumental good, but an intrinsic one, they invoke the idea of a man with a ring of invisibility, that grants him the power to get away with any injustice and be thought of as just, while in another part of the city lived a man who was truly just, but was thought of as unjust, and who would eventually be tortured and killed for what he did not do. After laying out and refuting the conventional, practical arguments for justice, the young men charge Socrates with explaining why it is better to be the latter, just man, than it is to be the unjust man who can get away with anything. ‘Why be good?’

Against this difficult challenge, Socrates walks the young men through the creation of an imaginary city, so that they might find where ‘justice’ is, and — on the assumption that the city is like the man — see if it is better to be just or unjust, once justice has been discovered. This journey through the ‘idea city’ covers all facets of social relationships and outlines a tripartite theory of the human soul (reason, the spirit, and the appetites), as well as the manners and causes of corruption, which is to say, disunity of these parts. This culminates in a psychoanalysis of five kinds of actual civic spirits — the monarchy or aristocracy (virtue), the ‘timarchy’ (honor), the oligarchy (money), the democracy (freedom), and the tyranny (power) — which correspond both to the character of the city, and the character of the archetypal man who occupies it.

What is significantly highlighted is the recursive imitation that separates images from the ‘truth’: honor is a kind of imperfect heuristic for virtue, since virtuous people are usually honored; money, an imperfect heuristic for honor, since esteemed people are usually wealthy; freedom an imperfect heuristic for money, since wealthy people can do as they like; power an imperfect heuristic for freedom, since freer men often wield more power. Yet with each separation of the image or ‘signal’, connection and understanding of the truth is lost by degree, as in a game of symbolic telephone across the social landscape.

The famous allegory of the cave depicts men chained in a cave, gazing up at shadows cast from a fire onto the cave wall. These men believe that the shadows are ‘real’ because that is all they know, but if one were freed, he might look back and see the puppets, and the fire behind the puppets. Through the mouth of the cave, he might see daylight, and if he journeyed up, he might see the real things in the physical world which the puppets only imitated. Then, once his eyes acclimated, he might even see the sun itself. This progression mirrors the political states and their degrees of separation from virtue by imitation.

After all of this exploration through the city and the cave, Socrates argues that to be unjust is to be at war with yourself, due to a separation from the idea of the good which causes your many appetites or your spirit to tyrannize over the rest of your body. The tyrant — the man possessing the ring of power — is not happier in his injustice, and the man who is just, even as he is being punished and killed for his justice — is nonetheless at peace with himself, but realistically, this inner harmony does not tend to lead toward torture and death, but the opposite.

And Socrates concludes his defense of justice with a very cryptic tale of a man who descended into the underworld, watching the souls of dead men choose their next lives, based only on virtue, extending out the importance of virtue into eternity, against the fleeting and transient value of material things and honors which the appetites and the spirit crave. He enjoins the young men to pursue virtue and shun vice and injustice: “And so here and in the thousand year journey that we have described we shall fare well.”

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Now, there is a lot more to say about the Republic, of course. There are, for instance, many (apparent) criticisms of poetry and of Homer in particular — as the “Homer guy” in our little group, I tried to be as active as I could in those parts of the discussion.

But the thing which bothered and intrigued me most about Plato, and which compelled me to take this course, was this question of forms.

Aside from the allegory of the cave, what Plato is probably most famous for is his theory of ‘forms’ or ‘ideas’, which seems to hold that ‘idea’ or “thought” of a thing is somehow more real than the thing itself. For example, we might look at a physical chair, and then look at a picture of a chair, and say that the physical chair is in some sense more real as a chair than the picture (perhaps a photograph). In the same way, that chair was once a plan inside a carpenter’s head (let’s assume factories are not in yet). Since the chair followed from the plan in the carpenter’s head, the idea is in some sense the more real chair than the physical chair.

This argument rubs a lot of people the wrong way, and bothered me in particular for years. In fact, I wrote several essays for PH2T3R (Descending Odin’s Throne, Philosophizing with the Body) directly attacking idealism and Plato’s forms directly, on the grounds that there was no metaphysical difference between the form that Plato praised and the image that he criticized. As I put it somewhat sarcastically in one of my homework essays:

The craftsman behind the forms is alleged to be God (597b-c), meaning God must have first given the name “chair” to the stump or stone that happened to be comfortable enough to sit in that some clever mortal decided to imitate its feeling with something more portable. It was in this way that God — in the form of the epic poet Jules Verne — invented the form of the submarine by means of an imitation of something that did not even exist (what Baudrillard might call a simulacrum, perhaps four times removed from reality), and also — like the muses, speaking through the epic poet William Gibson — invented the form of cyberspace (sometimes called “virtual reality” — a strange term in platonic philosophy) by coining the word.

This is a view seriously held by many serious neo-Platonists, who hold that “the world is mind,” and that mind and idea is ‘more real’ than physical matter. My complaint — which I typed up at great length in one of the open-chat sections of the course — circled around the linguistic foundation of these forms, and the coherence theory of truth more generally, which seems to permeate both the Republic and philosophy in general. Language, being arbitrary and metaphorical by nature, cannot be a solid foundation for metaphysics, but that seemed to be precisely what Plato was doing with his theory of the forms.

But instead of a fight with the forms, what I found was deeper layer of understanding what Plato was trying to describe, which caused me to come into complete agreement with Plato.

The key to this understanding is in the allegory of the cave, but it begins with an understanding of ‘form’ or ‘idea.’ The Greek words ιδέα and εἴδω don’t just refer to a ‘thought,’ but more specifically, an image. “Form” here is to be taken literally, as grasping the visual outline of a thing… as opposed to, for instance, just having the definition or name of a thing. This connotation is significant, and explains why many English readers, with an English conotive understanding of the word ‘idea’, might miss the importance of this.

In the Allegory of the Cave, the freed prisoner goes from a world of darkness up into progressively greater domains of light. This light represents less and less interpretive modes of knowledge, but not necessarily of being… except insofar as knowledge constitutes a sort of being. In other words, it is not that the idea of the chair is more real than the chair, but rather, the knowledge of the carpenter is more real than the knowledge of the sitter, in relation to the chair. With poetry lower down, and the sunlight world of pure forms (analogous to the process of dialectic) beyond the reach of descriptive language (533a), what we see in the idea of the forms is a tacit description of language as a shadow of the truth — not only not the truth, or its foundation, but several iterations of imitation away.

Perhaps the best explanation of this in more layman-friendly language is George Orwell’s essay on Politics and the English Language, where he criticized the use of stale language and set phrases which produce no visual image anymore… and in some cases, no meaning at all. In a similar manner, Plato seems to be depicting a problem of separation from knowledge by degrees of imprecision which can be felt in their lack of visual clarity. Again, vision is key.

So, far from Plato’s forms depending upon language, they in fact reject linguistic primacy, while acknowledging the necessity of language for practical conversation. We can’t just live in the world of pure images — we do have to descend back down into the cave, after all…

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The implications of this are, I think, pretty enormous. But there are so many dimensions and rabbit holes to Plato that it is impossible to describe them all here. It is fair to say that Plato is foundational to all of Western thought, no less than Homer, and that it is difficult to understand Western culture — and ourselves, as a product of that culture — without an understanding of Plato.

But this is not just because of what Plato set into motion, as objects of interest and inquiry for Western minds. It is also because Plato saw into the human soul more generally, in a way perhaps no mind before or after has. And we can learn from him — about ourselves, about what is good, and what is dangerous, about harmony and addiction and truth and beauty and love and order and justice — if we have the curiosity and the patience and the delicacy to explore with entertaining minds.

I have spent years proselytizing Homer to people, and still do so… and in addition, I would add Plato — specifically the Republic — as a core work to familiarize yourself with.

What better use of time is there, on this earth, than connection with the greatest minds in history?

To that end, I can’t recommend Millerman’s work (including his free stuff on his YouTube channel) highly enough. But Plato himself — like virtue — is free.

Or, if you’re picky, $12.69 on Amazon.