I have mentioned this paragraph at the conclusion of Book IX of Plato’s Republic (trans. by Jowett) before, but I remain curious: what is the traditional accounting for these sentences, which taken on their face seem to at least hint at an intended metaphorical reading of the entire work?
Note too that such a reading is quite a lot more interesting than the ordinary and unhappy literal examination of his implausible ideas about governance, with their implied historicism and teleology. What would it mean to “live after the manner” of the city Plato describes?
(And how insufferable a first-year class on The Republic can be, with all the students bored with what they consider manifestly indefensible authoritarian ideas! My peers considered Plato a proto-fascist and saw nothing of interest in his arguments. But if we’d not taken it as a revolutionary action-plan, it might have been more compelling).
Allan Bloom’s translation differs a bit:
“But in heaven,” I said, “perhaps, a pattern is laid up for the man who wants to see and found a city within himself on the basis of what he sees. It doesn’t make any difference whether it is or will be somewhere. For he would mind the things of this city alone, and of no other.”
Last, and for nostalgia’s sake, from the first translation I read, by Sterling and Scott, back at Bard in the days when girls made fun of me for having a website and I looked liked Harry Potter:
It makes no difference whether such a city now exists or ever will. But perhaps its prototype can be found somewhere in heaven for him who wants to see. Seeing it, he will declare himself its citizen. The politics of this city will be his politics and none other.
I put the question to the academics and sages and thinkers and those, like me, with no credentials at all. Ideas?
