7.10: Completing the Education of the Rulers

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See 539d-540c. People training to be rulers will spend roughly five years, from about age thirty to thirty-five, in dialectical inquiry (this coming on the heels of ten years or so of formal mathematical study). Then, for fifteen years, they will “go down into the cave again,” and “take command in matters of war and the other offices suitable for young people, so that they won’t be inferior to the others in experience.” Socrates appears to have in mind something like a rotating internship, enabling the rulers-in-training to learn firsthand how the various jobs in the city are performed, what sorts of people succeed best at what jobs, what problems various workers face, what hopes and fears they have, and so on. This fifteen year internship studying the world of particulars compliments the fifteen previous years focussed on the intelligible realm. Finally, around age fifty, “those who have survived the tests and are entirely best in every practical task and every science must be led at last to the end and compelled to lift up the radiant light of their souls, and look toward what itself provides light for everything.” Having come to understand the form of the good, they are to rule.

Is practical experience necessary for coming to understand the form of the good?
Does it make sense to suppose that a philosopher would have to be “compelled” in the end to turn his or her understanding to the form of the good? Is there any reason a lover of wisdom might hesitate and need a gentle push?
What might Socrates mean when he says that the souls of the philosophers have a “radiant light”?
If what it is for a soul to be just is for each part of the soul to do it sproper job, and if the proper job of the rational part of the soul is to rule wisely, and if wisdom requires knowledge of the form of the good, and if this knowledge is achieved only by philosophers, then it follows that philosophers are the only truly just people. Can this be so?