Philosophy: Plato's Republic - Essay Example

Running Head Philosophy: Plato's Republic Philosophy: Plato's Republic Inserts His/Her Inserts Grade Customer Inserts Tutor's Name 26 February 2009 The Republic is a philosophical treatise concerned primarily with the question of justice and with the living of a just life. Its principal emphasis, then, is on the conduct of individuals. However, The Republic relies quite heavily on analogies between the individual self and the political state, suggesting repeatedly that the rule of one's own self by each individual is a procedure quite similar to the rule of the state by political leaders The ideal city portrayed by Plato represents a complex account of the relation between nature and nurture, the state and population, society and governance. Describing an the ideal city, Plato underlines that people are all born with physical and intellectual equipment that makes them suited to perform some tasks better than others. The model of the ideal city involves ideas of justice and nature, human relations and labor relations. In the Republic, justice is explained as a thing one ought to do and does ones best. Plato portrays that the ideal city consists of three social groups: workers, guardians and philosophers. Each of them hands certain natures that they cannot alter. Plato explains that attempting to do what people are not fitted to do by nature will only make them miserable. On the other hand, the tools people are handed at birth are not sufficient to guarantee that they will excel at the particular function nature assigns people. For that, education and training are necessary. Human natures must be nurtured if they are to bear fruit. Plato believes this to be as true of philosophy as it is of soldiering, farming, or weaving. "After the manner of poets, would seem to have spoken darkly of the nature of justice; for he really meant to say that justice is the giving to each man what is proper to him, and this he termed a debt" (Plato 1996). Plato gives a special attention to the idea of justice and its role in the idea city. He state that those who rule do so by making and enforcing laws. Justice is obedience to those laws and injustice is disobedience to them. Since those who make the laws are not fools, and since they make laws that work to their own advantage, justice turns out to be the advantage of the strongest. "Two virtues remain to be discovered in the State--first, temperance, and then justice which is the end of our search" (Plato 1996). Plato describes that since most of people are not self-sufficient even in providing themselves with the requisites of physical survival, a role of the city is to produce them. The city incorporates a division of labor for the provision of food, shelter, and clothing. Plato underlines that people are more productive if they secialize in one thing rather than try to excel at many things, Socrates sets up the city as a community of interdependent shepherds, farmers, carpenters, weavers, cobblers, black smiths, traders, shopkeepers, and so forth. Socrates agrees that the city he has described would be a truly healthy one and that to admit luxuries into it will. "Men of the governing class, are habituated to lead a life of luxury and idleness both of body and mind" (Plato 1996). On questioning poets about their expertise, Plato found that they in fact lacked the wisdom which they claimed, and were thus less wise than Socrates, who was at least aware of his own ignorance. He thus came to see that the wisdom which the oracle had ascribed to him consisted precisely in this awareness of his ignorance, and that he had a divine mission to show others that their own claims to substantive wisdom were unfounded. Plato underlines that this problem has deep roots and diverse causes: "there is an old quarrel between philosophy and poetry" (Plato 1996). Plato underlines that this enterprise of examining others (referred to as 'the Socratic elenchus'), which was the basis of his unpopularity and consequent misrepresentation, he later in the speech describes as the greatest benefit that has ever been conferred on the city, and his obligation to continue it in obedience to the god as so stringent that he would not be prepared to abandon it even if he could save his life by doing so. Socrates' call for banishing poets from the city, also makes it clear that the vast system of regulation applies to adults as well as children. "If, Socrates, we are to be guided at all by the analogy of the preceding instances, then justice is the art which gives good to friends and evil to enemies" (Plato1996). Plato would have philosophy be its own jury; he sees in it the capacity to get beyond all that is merely customary and conventional, relative and subjective. For him, philosophy can tell us what is true according to the very nature of the cosmos. Philosophy does not conduct itself. It is a reflective activity practiced by human beings, and there is no surefire method for escaping the biases of culturally rooted custom, convention, and common sense. Try as we might to get out from under them, these influences will inevitably cloud our vision. Furthermore, the cosmos is really an inherently moral order with values already there, given, woven into the very scheme of nature Perhaps it is the distinctive predicament of human beings to have to inject values into a cosmos that is indifferent to their plight. "The prudent and quiet character is neither easily imitated nor, when imitated, easily understood," (Plato 604e) In this case, people are saddled with serious problems if this is the case, conflict is inevitable. While such problems may spur the search for a solution, there is no guarantee that a solution can be found. Also, there is supreme irony in the fact that philosophy can lead philosophers to forget its origin in ordinary life. "If the poets speak truly, why then we had better be unjust, and offer of the fruits of injustice; for if we are just" (Plato 1996). Philosophy can easily come to be viewed as a diversion from life, and perhaps even as an escape from life. Justice leads a human to happiness because it shows a person what is socially right and wrong. The only function he indicates early on is that the overseers are to educate the auxiliaries. Good soldiers must be fearless and ferocious, Socrates says, but these same characteristics should not be turned against the population the auxiliaries are supposed to protect. The task is to make the auxiliaries into junkyard dogs, who are ferocious toward outsiders but gentle toward their owners. This can be done only through proper training, and Socrates lays down the principles for such training; in an actual city it would be the overseers who put them into effect. It seems, then, that the overseers, or rulers, are introduced only to train the auxiliaries, who, in turn, were introduced only because luxuries were admitted in the city. "State was not the disproportionate happiness of any one class, but the greatest happiness of the whole; we thought that in a State which is ordered with a view to the good of the whole we should be most likely to find justice, and in the ill-ordered State injustice: and, having found them, we might then decide which of the two is the happier" (Plato 1996). Plato argues that the members of the various classes should stick solely to the business for which they are suited by nature and not meddle in the functions of the other classes. There is an element of truth to the commonsense notion that justice means giving to persons what rightfully belongs to them; in what Plato regards as a deeper conception of justice, however, what "belongs" to a person must be interpreted to mean the tasks assigned to that person by nature. If the auxiliaries get interested in making shoes or ruling, they are not going to be good soldiers, and courage is undermined. Plato underlines that If philosophers occupy themselves with building houses or developing battle strategies, they are not going to be able to rise to knowledge of the truth, wisdom suffers, and the whole social structure based on that wisdom comes tumbling down. Plato supposes that in idea city women should not be excluded from the ranks of the auxiliaries or overseers, which is rather audacious, given that women in ancient Greece fared no better in public life than they have in subsequent societies until very recently. Plato's argument is that although women differ by nature in some aspects from men, those aspects are not relevant to the functions they would perform as auxiliaries or overseers. The potential to fill these roles is endowed by nature, but it is not linked to gender, he says, anymore than baldness is linked to the capacity to make shoes. Some women are not fit to rule, but then neither are some men. Plato writes: And therefore we must consider whether in appointing our guardians we would look to their greatest happiness individually, or whether this principle of happiness does not rather reside in the State as a whole. But if the latter be the truth, then the guardians and auxiliaries, and all others equally with them, must be compelled or induced to do their own work in the best way. And thus the whole State will grow up in a noble order, and the several classes will receive the proportion of happiness which nature assigns to them" (Plato 1996). The only ostensible exception in conflict between poets and philosophers is an examination of the claim of a professional reciter of poetry to possess wisdom. But even that ties in closely with the general ethical interest of these dialogues, since the debunking of claims to wisdom has the implication that both poets and their interpreters are directed not by wisdom, but by non-rational inspiration, and hence that poetry has no claim to the central educational role which Greek tradition ascribed to it. "For it is necessary that the good poet, if he is going to make fair poems about the things his poetry concerns, be in possession of knowledge when he makes his poems" (Plato 1996). Plato underlines that poets seem to see the fact that we can say or write only one sentence at a time as something positive. Thus linear approach, for example, allows them to use the element of surprise to advantage. Philosophers sometimes see this same fact as an inescapable burden. They would just as soon get everything out all at once, if only they could, and they often work hard to eliminate surprise. Surely, the style of most philosophical writing is very different from that of novells. It is not unusual for philosophers to give a forecast of what they are going to do, do it, and then remind us of what they have done. "When even the best of us hear Homer or any other of the tragic poets imitating one of the heroes in mourning and making quite an extended speech with lamentation, we give ourselves over to following the imitation" (Plato 1996). The philosophical style of proceeding shows the writer's will to be fully self-conscious of every move it makes, and every consequence of every move. He or she wants to be sure that when the work is complete there is nothing outstanding, nothing that has not been brought within the scope of self-conscious understanding. This aim is laudable but it is impossible to achieve. The reason for this is that the language in which philosophy is expressed has a life of its own; words are inevitably loaded with subtle meanings that sometimes say more and sometimes less than those who use them self-consciously intend. Thus, good philosophers should be ready for some surprises when others interpret what they have written. Some philosophers recognize that language sometimes uses us as much as we use it, but then raise this fact to the mysterious and grander claim that language itself is a sort of all-embracing and evolving absolute, outside of which there is nothing else. Typically, they claim to be the humble servants of language conceived as such, but specially anointed servents nonetheless. Plato states that "all arts and all things human that have to do with virtue and vice, and the divine things too" that the poet articulates (Plato 1996). This can make philosophy seem far removed from ordinary life, but the questions it addresses are at bottom rooted in this life. Philosophy grows out of life and can be seen as an attempt to give a comprehensive account of life and its complexities. Philosophy, in other words, must be its own jury. "But most extraordinary of all is their mode of speaking about virtue and the gods: they say that the gods apportion calamity and misery to many good men" (Plato 1996). It begins in ordinary life, in which rules the day more often than not, but if it is to get beyond subjective choices and mere custom and convention and rise to a knowledge, it cannot lapse back into appeals to customarily recognized external authorities, even if those authorities are religious ones. "We praise as a good poet the man who most puts us in this state" (Plato 230). In contrast, philosophy pulls itself out of mind and up to objective knowledge by its own bootstraps. Plato underlines: "You will admit that the same education which makes a man a good guardian will make a woman a good guardian" (Plato 1996). If rule by philosophers and the reasoning part is not possible, rule by auxiliaries and the spirited part is next best; and if rule by these is not possible, then rule by craftspeople and the appetitive part is the only possibility remaining. If one's primary aim is to achieve knowledge, other activities, including the quest for honor and the satisfaction of the appetites, must be limited. The quest for honor is not as worthy as the pursuit of knowledge, but it nevertheless requires sacrificing other values. People want not only basic foodstuffs but relishes and other condiments, not just basic housing but fine furniture, and not just clothing but jewelry. In short, people want luxuries. If it is honor you want, you may have to give up being rich. The pursuit of wealth, a desire of the appetitive part of the soul, is less worthy than the pursuit of knowledge or honor, but even it entails sacrifice. Recognizing that people are not all equipped by nature to gain access to the truth, and that even those who do have the capacity must receive special training, people institute a division of labor. Farmers will be farmers, carpenters will be carpenters, weavers will be weavers, and soldiers will be soldiers. And philosophers, not having to worry about growing food, building houses, making clothes, or defending the city, will be afforded the opportunity to ascend through rigorous training to the apprehension of the truth. They will then govern the rest of us in the light of that truth. The organization of the city makes philosophy possible, and philosophy makes living according to the truth possible. "Men and women are to have a common way of life such as we have described--common education, common children; and they are to watch over the citizens in common whether abiding in the city or going out to war they are to keep watch together" (Plato 1996). Plato devises a scheme for defining generations, in which all children born within certain time periods, unaware of who their biological parents are, will treat each other as brothers and sisters. Socrates states: "Let our city be accounted neither large nor small, but one and self-sufficing" (Plato 1996). The policy seems to fit within his general political vision. In the ideal city while individuals must serve society, society, in turn, exists to serve individuals. Plato wants people to live according to nature. He apparently suspects, however, that many persons are not naturally going to accept that the stations they happen to occupy in his ideal city are the stations they ought to occupy by nature. The Republic shows both how philosophy can help people wrestle with the problems of ordinary life and how it can offer an escape from life. In this case, if people recognize that many of their views are not their own inventions, and are often traceable to so-called authorities, the question arises whether the views of the purported authorities are actually correct. In the Republic, justice and just behavior leads to happiness of citizens according to their social class and profession. Plato's requirement that happiness must be self-sufficient is used as a main argument by those who try to press comprehensive interpretation of the issues of happiness. If happiness on its own makes life attractive and missing in nothing, then, so it is claimed, it cannot be restricted solely to consideration. Works Cited Plato. The Republic. Transl. by Benjamin Jowett. 1996. 2008. Read More