Plato's Republic
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The concept of happiness and individual liberty are values inherent in western democracy, values that appear to have no place in the authoritarian concept of the ideal state as presented by Plato in the Republic. Plato unfolds his concept of the ideal state by telling us that only those who know the good are fit to rule. To know the good, he deems that a long and arduous period of intellectual training is required to discover this knowledge. Such a course of training, in a famous analogy of Plato’s, allows men to transcend to the real world outside as opposed to the underground cave where most men are intellectually confined. The Republic is ten books in length and begins with the concept of justice, not politics. Socrates narrates the work, but the sophist Thrasymachus insists that he knows all too well what the concept of justice is and that the other definitions being given are foolish. As Thrasymachus says “I declare justice is nothing but the advantage of the stronger” (Rouse 137). Thrasymachus explains the concept of Nietzsche slave morality, where the rulers of the state are tyrants who break the rules that they enforce against the weak masses. Thus, anyone who is strong would never act like the masses who support rulers who break the laws they impose on them. To Thrasymachus, the “just man comes off worse than an unjust man everywhere” (Rouse 137). Socrates refutes this charge and explains that if the weak prevent the
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n or philosopher is dominated by the reason component of the soul, the warrior, the spirit, and the commoner, the desires. The ideal state is described in Book VII as an aristocracy because the rule of the best is achieved by Plato’s breeding concept. However, warriors, rulers, and the people will erode this ideal state and ultimately turn the state into a timocracy, oligarchy, and democracy respectively. Ultimately, the state will be ruled by tyranny, where the individual tyrant rules according to his own desires. The Republic ends with a fairly unsatisfying assessment of the ideal state and the ideal individual in that we are cautioned that we better be good or the gods will see to it we are punished. Er describes the afterlife for those who have made bad choices. One is destined to “eat his children and suffer other horrors” (Rouse 420). Plato says he was destined for this fate because he “owed his goodness to habit and custom and not to knowledge” (Lee 399).
Thus, to have an ideal state an ideal guardian must be bred. In one of his most famous allegories, the Allegory of the Cave, Plato likens this ideal guardian to a freed prisoner who is able to escape the darkness and shadows of the cave which bear no resemblance
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Approximate Word count = 1890
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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