Plato's Republic - Part 3

The Allegory of the Cave Writ Large (Structural Analysis of Books 1-6)

In the first post of this series, I related the importance of Plato’s Republic as the finest sustained work of philosophy extant in the Western Tradition.

In the second post of the series, I explained what Plato intended his Magnum Opus to be—the pursuit of a city that is justly governed, one that will not be susceptible to the injustice that corrupted Athens and brought about its tragic fall.

In this post, I intend to elucidate the structure of The Republic by way of a summary analysis of the first six books.

To begin with, the structure is most interesting in that it is chiastic in nature, which is not uncommon in ancient literature. A chiasm is a symmetrical approach to communicating in which a theme or idea is treated together with the variant of that theme or idea and in which the middle of the structure becomes the pinnacle or point of the message. For example, chiastic poetry might follow an A, B, C, D, C’, B’, A’ pattern.

This pattern is found repeatedly in the Old and New Testaments. Consider the story of Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9 as one of many examples.

(vs.1) Intro: “all the earth” had one language

(vs. 2) people settle together in Shinar

(vss. 3-4) resolution of the people “come, let us…”

(vs. 5) Pinnacle: YHWH discovers the plot

(vss. 6-7) resolution of YHWH “come, let us…”

(vs. 8) people disperse from Shinar

(vs. 9) Conclusion: “all the earth” has many languages

In the case of The Republic, the end of Book Six serves as the pinnacle (i.e., The Good). We are then immediately introduced to the Allegory of the Cave in Book Seven.

In other words, the Allegory of the Cave from Book Seven is constructed symbolically by the dialogue itself. The trajectory of the dialogue serves as a road map that emulates the journey of a philosopher up out of the cave, into the sun, and then back down to the cave again. Consider how the dialogue moves the quest upward and the manner in which the structure imitates the allegory as each of the books are briefly introduced.