Plato's Republic

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 question can be raised whether Plato intended his Republic to be more than an ideal. His Theory of Forms shows an awareness of the existence of qualities derived from the abstract and ideal Forms, with the object or quality in the real world being like the shadows on the walls of the cave in Book VII. What we see in the real world are but imperfect copies or imitations of the ideal, and the Republic can be seen as

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n imperfect reflection of the ideal, and he would make this statement most explicitly in The Republic with the allegory of the cave: In the Republic, Plato illustrated the difference between authentic knowledge of reality and the illusion of appearances with a striking image: Human beings are like prisoners chained to the wall of a dark subterranean cave, where they can never turn around to see the light of a fire that is higher up and at a distance behind them. The shadows represent the nature of the times in which Sophocles lived, less than ideal and only shadows of the ideal that Plato is attempting to revive in his fellow man. As noted, the nature of the individual and the nature of the state are parallel. Socrates speaks of the relationship between the individual human soul and the society of which the individual is a part, intending to make a moral statement about the nature of the state and its relationship to the individual. Socrates says at the outset that it is necessary to admit that the elements that make up the state have to exist in the individuals who compose that state, for they have to come from somewhere, and the human population is the only possible source. Socrates has already noted that the state ha

Category: Philosophy - P