Republic Book 3

Most of Book 3 is a pretty boring continuation of the same parenthesis that Socrates opened last chapter with his discussion of the luxurious city (372d3).  Recall that once we exceed the limits of the simple and healthy city, and develop a luxurious city, we need more land and more people, hence we need "guardians" of this land.  For most of this chapter Socrates rambles on about how to house and educate these guardians.  The individual rules he lays out are pretty forgettable; the main point is simply that these men are supposed to represent the perfect embodiment of the concept of harmony.  In the final pages though , the chapter takes an interesting turn (412b8).  Socrates asks, in effect, who guards the guardians?  Which guardians will form an elite ruling core within the ranks of the guardians, who are already a sequestered elite within the city?  In this context, he introduces the famous noble lie,  the myth of the metals.  The idea is to tell people that, although everyone in the city is a brother born to the same earth mother, there is nevertheless a natural hierarchy among them based on whether their souls contain gold (ruling guardians), silver (auxiliary guardians), iron (craftsmen), or bronze (farmers).  The myth adds a new twist to the parenthesis opened earlier, because it (along with the hint at 399e4) suggests that Plato may not return to discuss the problem of how justice arises in the simple healthy city he first described.  Instead, the problem has morphed into how to purify an existing unjust city from within.  The auxiliaries and guardians he has spent so much time describing have a function beyond the one initially advertised for them.  They are the purifiers of the luxurious city, the ones who collect and purify the gold contained within it.  The end result of this process is not only the production of justice in the luxurious city, but the reproduction of the ruling guardians themselves. 

For completeness, let me briefly note the principle rules Socrates suggests for the education of guardians.  He continues the discussion of which stories the guardians should hear as youths by asking which are most likely to instill in them the qualities they will need to defend and rule the city.  They have to be courageous, so they should hear stories that will make them unafraid of dying in battle.  They shouldn't fear or feel sentimental about loss, so they should never hear stories where the hero becomes distraught over the death of a companion.  Laughter, Socrates claims, is a close cousin to violence, so the guardians also should spend much time with comedies.  Lying is bad, so the guardians must learn to be honest (though of course we've already seen Socrates suggest that deceit can be used for a good purpose by the rulers).  The guardians must be the personification of moderation, so we shouldn't tell them stories that depict drunkenness or gluttony or other overwhelming passions.  They also shouldn't care a whit about money, so we need to ban any stories suggesting that heroes or gods can be bribed by money or sacrifice.  

To cap off this elaborate list of banned books (which stretches all the way back into Book 2) Socrates asks how we should handle stories about human beings.  This might seem an odd question at this stage, but the examples he's given come from Homer or other myths, so they describe gods, and heroes and spirits and such.  Perhaps surprisingly, Socrates says we need to withhold judgement on these stories for the time being.

Because I think we'll say that what poets and prose-writers tell us about the most important matters concerning human beings is bad. They say that many unjust people are happy and many just ones wretched, that injustice is profitable if it escapes detection, and that justice is another's good but one's own loss. I think we'll prohibit these stories and order the poets to compose the opposite kind of poetry and tell the opposite kind of tales. Don't you think so?
I know so.
But if you agree that what I said is correct, couldn't I reply that you've agreed to the very point that is in question in our whole discussion? 
And you'd be right to make that reply.
Then we'll agree about what stories should be told about human beings only when we've discovered what sort of thing justice is and how by nature it profits the one who has it, whether he is believed to be just or not. (392b9)

This clearly foreshadows the myth of the metals which concludes the chapter.  Gods and heroes and such are in sense all cut from the same cloth.  As inherent protagonists, stories about them always need to show them in a positive light.  Men, however, come in all different mixtures.  To know which ones to praise and which to blame, we will first need a story about justice itself that lets us classify and order them according to some principle.  The myth of the metals will provide exactly this story.  In the present educational context, we can see clearly how, as a myth, the story of the metals is not meant so much to describe justice as to be a tool for producing it in our youth.  These will naturally grow into exactly the sort of adults who can define justice.  There's always a circularity at the core of Platonism.

After he finishes discussing content, Socrates goes on to prescribe even the style that storytellers, and even musicians would be forced to use.  First person narration -- a form of imitative identification -- is fine if the author is discussing something praiseworthy, but actions we frown upon should only be related from the third person perspective (396e2) so that the reader avoids any identification with the character.  Musical modes that lend themselves to sad songs or drinking songs should be avoided, as well as many alternations of rhythm.  These heavy handed restrictions are all ultimately aimed at cultivating our guardians' love of simple rhythms and harmonies (401d3).   With a comprehensive knowledge of the few building blocks Socrates has left for them, the guardians will see the entire world as a book containing various combinations of the primitive Forms.  An alphabet of what it means to think (D&R pg 181)?

It's just the way it was with learning how to read. Our ability wasn't adequate until we realized that there are only a few letters that occur in all sorts of different combinations, and that—whether written large or small—they were worthy of our attention, so that we picked them out eagerly wherever they occurred, knowing that we wouldn't be competent readers until we knew our letters.
True.
And isn't it also true that if there are images of letters reflected in mirrors or water, we won't know them until we know the letters themselves, for both abilities are parts of the same craft and discipline?
Absolutely.
Then, by the gods, am I not right in saying that neither we, nor the guardians we are raising, will be educated in music and poetry until we know the different forms of moderation, courage, frankness, high- mindedness, and all their kindred, and their opposites too, which are moving around everywhere, and see them in the things in which they are, both themselves and their images, and do not disregard them, whether they are written on small things or large, but accept that the knowledge of both large and small letters is part of the same craft and discipline? (402a8)

Socrates then moves on to describe the physical training of the guardians, and their relationship to doctors and lawyers.  The guardians must of course be strong and fit, but in the manner of a soldier, not an athlete.  Since it's important for them to be able to handle any physical circumstance, they are trained very much in the style of the Spartans.  There's a lot of sleeping and eating little to go with skipping deserts and ladies.  And while a guardian may occasionally get sick and require a doctor, none of these folks will ever be allowed to be chronically sick because this would be the sign of a weak and unhealthy character.  Finally, Socrates doesn't think a guardian is ever likely to need a lawyer, though he may end up as a judge someday.  

Socrates finally sums up his description of the education and habits of the guardians as a way of creating a superior harmony in their souls.  They must cultivate their taste in music and poetry according to the rules he laid down earlier.  They must also cultivate the physical strength and 'spiritedness' in battle.  Neither of these activities must be allowed to unbalance the other.  The goal, however, is not so much a harmony of body and soul, as a harmony within a soul which includes both a spirited and contemplative part.  

It seems, then, that a god has given music and physical training to human beings not, except incidentally, for the body and the soul but for the spirited and wisdom-loving parts of the soul itself, in order that these might be in harmony with one another, each being stretched and relaxed to the appropriate degree.
It seems so.
Then the person who achieves the finest blend of music and physical training and impresses it on his soul in the most measured way is the one we'd most correctly call completely harmonious and trained in music, much more so than the one who merely harmonizes the strings of his instrument. (411e3)

I note in passing that middle Plato is much more contemptuous of the body than he was in the earlier Socratic dialogs.  The soul is shifting from the most important things to the only thing of importance.  The truly harmonious musical soul here seems to acquire a body almost of its own right.

Book 3 concludes with the myth of the metals, which I am provisionally taking as the ) we have been looking for since 377d9.  As I explained at the outset, the context is that we need to decide who will lead the guardians.  We'd like to choose the guardians who are the most skilled and loyal, and these two criteria actually merge together in Socrates' job description.  The ideal guardian will be the one who most completely and steadfastly loves the city and identifies his own benefit with the benefit of the city (412d3).  So the first thing this guardian must guard against is any shaking of his conviction in this identification (412e4).  In other words, the ruling guardians (the true 'guardians', now distinguished from 'auxiliaries') are the ones who best guard their own convictions.  Since all the guardians have been brought up with the conviction that the city and the people in it are wonderful and harmonious, mostly we just need to find the guardians who are least likely to forget this conviction under pressure of "theft, magic spells, or compulsion" (413b1).  These boil down to a guardian being talked out of his conviction by some specious argument, or otherwise lured or forced away from it by pleasure (perhaps bribes) or pain (perhaps torture).  So finding the true guardians involves constantly testing who clings most tightly to their love of the city.

We must keep them under observation from childhood and set them tasks that are most likely to make them forget such a conviction or be deceived out of it, and we must select whoever keeps on remembering it and isn't easily deceived, and reject the others. Do you agree? (413c8)

The myth of the metals (414d1-415c9) is a story about how this selection process works.  The idea is to create a self-perpetuating cycle where people who are told the story believe it, and in believing it, act according to its logic, which in turn actually makes the story come true.  So the story is at the same time about how the city came to be structured as it is, and an active device for structuring it that way.  This noble lie is the 'true falsehood' we saw last chapter (382a4).  If possible, Socrates would like the falsehood to be so true that it is hidden even from the rulers themselves.

How, then, could we devise one of those useful falsehoods we were talking about a while ago, one noble falsehood that would, in the best case, persuade even the rulers, but if that's not possible, then the others in the city? (414b8)

He doesn't go quite as far as saying that a guardian's conviction in the truth of the myth of the metals is actually the perfect final test of their ability to guard themselves and the city, but this would be a straightforward implication.  The people who win any game tend to think it's a fair test of skill.  Only the losers complain about luck and chance.  So it seems pretty plausible that a guardian who grew up with this story, and whose soul later proved to contain gold, would convince themselves, and if possible everyone else, of its truth.  In promoting this true falsehood that tells, "the most important part of himself about the most important things" (382a7), that speaks, "to one's soul about the things that are" (382b3), and that leaves, "ignorance in the soul of someone who has been told a falsehood" (382b7), the guardian actually converts the false into the true.  Or maybe it would be better to say that he purifies the false to find its kernel of truth.  The myth tells of a process of purifying gold from the metals mixed in a city.  It's retelling would reproduce the guardians.  And the ability to select these guardians constitutes the purification of the luxurious city and its ordering along just and rational lines.  This is how Plato closes his parenthesis.  We don't find the Form of Justice alone, embodied nakedly, so to speak, in a simple, healthy city.  That city is myth.  In its place though, we introduce another myth that can purify Justice from the actual city we know, which is a messy, luxurious, and mixed place.  What are the Forms if not the purification of the mixed things we find in the world?