Plato's Ideal State

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 since he 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. David Sachs argues that Plato committed a fallacy in his thinking when he considered the central issue of the relationship between justice and happiness in the ideal state, and he offers an analysis of The Republic to show how this occurred and its consequences.

Socrates speaks of many of the elements to be found in the Republic in terms that show they are ideals to be sought rather than something that can actually be

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xpresses his view of the supremacy of justice again and again: You agree that justice is one of the greatest goods, the ones that are worth getting for the sake of what comes from them, but much more so for their own sake, such as seeing, hearing, knowing, being healthy, and all other goods that are fruitful by their own nature and not simply because of reputation. therefore, praise justice as a good of that kind. . . (Grube 42). Much of what Socrates concludes about justice being superior to injustice might seem to be self-evident, and David Sachs finds that the issues raised have not been examined carefully. He also finds that there is reason to see a fallacy in the argument that Plato offers leading to the conclusion that just men are happier than any men who are unjust: The fallacy of irrelevance that, in my judgment, wrecks the Republic's main argument is due to the lack of connection between two conceptions of justice that Plato employs (Sachs 35). These two conceptions are the Vulgar Conception and the Platonic Conception. The Vulgar Conception is found near the end of the fourth book as Glaucon notes several vulgar tests to apply to the concept of justice, and the vulgar criteria for justice are found in the nonperf

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