Plato's Concept of the Good Life

Plato's Republic describes a society that is completely rational, based on Plato's concept of the good life and developed to create and protect that sort of life within the context of a civil state. What Plato seeks in this dialogue is a definition of the perfect life and the perfect state to promote and sustain that life. The Ideal State is a concept and not a reality, either in Plato's time or since. Much of what Plato embodies in the Ideal State is probably a reaction to imperfections in the government and society of his time. Plato lived in a time of turmoil and warfare, and he created a society that would be free of strife if it lived up to the ideal. The fact that few would want to live in the society Plato proposes may be because Plato ignores or subsumes human nature, and for his perfect society to work to protect the perfect life, it would have to be made up of perfect people. Plato tries to address this through education and other means, but in the final analysis his Republic must remain an ideal only, and to a great extent one man's ideal. The society depicted in the film Star Wars is also not a perfect society. Luke Skywalker lives in a time of turmoil as did Plato, and he and other members of his clique believe in the possibility of an ideal state and seek to overthrow their oppressors in order to institute it. An analysis of the moral dilemmas facing Luke and others in the film show how Plato's conceptions can illuminate some of the meaning in the film

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o define the matter. Similarly, in the Republic there are goals pursued by institutions and individuals, but there is no guarantee that they will be successful at attaining the ideal they seek. The Republic itself can be read as a the search for an ideal, in this case Plato's ideal of a society without strife, and there is no guarantee that he will attain this ideal. In Star Wars, there is an intuitive understanding of the nature of the virtues and of the fact that while achieving them is important, the act of seeking them is itself a virtue. Luke is an innocent who is being taught the importance of courage, wisdom, discipline, and ultimately justice. Indeed, much of what Luke is taught in the course of this film relates to Plato's sense of justice as beginning inside the individual: But in truth, justice, it appears, was something like this; not, however, in a man's outward practice, but inwardly and truly he must do his own business in himself (Plato 244). The four virtues seem clearly interrelated, with the state needing discipline to attain wisdom and courage and needing all three to achieve justice. While Plato describes these virtues in terms of the state, he also makes it clear that there is a relationship between

Category: Philosophy - P