Turning the Soul Around

Abstract

Many of the things we noted about The Book of Tea could also be said about Plato’s Republic. Although it is perhaps his best-known work, it, too, may strike us as rather foreign. Much of it is given over to some very abstract and technical philosophizing. In form as well as in content, it can seem entirely distant from our everyday reality.

Then education is the craft concerned with doing this very thing, this turning around, and with how the soul can most easily and effectively be made to do it. It isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately.

—Plato, Republic