Socrates' City - Essay Example

Socrates’ city is an imagination of a utopia that comprises three classes: the rulers (the golden), the auxiliaries (silver), and the commoners (bronze and iron). Education and selective breeding are to be used to keep every person in his/her category. However, this attempt still gives three waves. The first wave is equality between the sexes and the issuance of common tasks to both sexes. Herein, even Socrates himself agreed that women are weaker than men and thereby corroborating the primordial and dominant belief that men should work more than women. Socrates proposes the issuance of selective education to diffuse this wave.  The second wave is the perceived commonality between women and children, which repudiated the place of marriage and family. Socrates proposes selective breeding as the answer to the second wave. The third wave was the burden of making the kings philosophers. Socrates postulates that this problem could be solved by combining selective breeding and education (Simpson, 2006). However, it is clear that these postulations are wrought with a lot of setbacks that stem from the dynamics of real life, as shall be seen forthwith. 

Whether the City Is Plausible/ Realistic

By all reasonable means, the city that Socrates envisions is not realistic.  Even the genesis of the city Kallipolis is contrived in Socrates’ imagination. In his imagination, Socrates takes away all the unpleasant realities that characterize normal cities, in order to create a utopia.  It is because of being purely a utopia that Socrates’ Kallipolis meets several obstacles or waves (Dobbs, 2004).

 Secondly, the manner in which Socrates intends to settle the three obstacles (waves) is not tenable in any human society. Socrates creates three classes of people: the aristocrats or rulers, the auxiliaries (the soldiers), and the producers (the commoners). Human existence and society are too dynamic to be contained by/in these three classes. It is possible to have a commoner work hard to ascend into the auxiliary, or even into an aristocracy.  Likewise, a society that rigidly and structurally maintains these three classes is one that is based on a caste system and therefore can neither rid itself of social injustice nor last. Even with selective education which Socrates proposes as the way to stave off revolutionary spirits, it still remains impossible to imagine a system where the masses find satisfaction in being commoners for posterity.  This proves the difficulty of solving the second wave.

The idea of selecting the most intellectually and biologically refined in the society and imposing endogamy within it, and then later raising their progeny away from their parents’ care and identity as a way of creating philosopher kings is still largely impractical. It is, for instance, questionable if intelligence can (consistently) be biologically propagated, while the manner of individuals raised without parental care, guidance, and love remains largely uncertain.  

Solving the second wave through selective and restrictive breeding as a way of eradicating the family unit and marriage is impossible since human beings are and have always been gregarious by nature. Any critical philosopher or thinker will automatically question the point in which the society not based on the family structure will be introduced and how the move will be executed.   

Measures/ Elements Needed To Make It So in Socrates' Day or Ours

Despite Socrates’ city being a utopia, it is universally agreed that the need to make the society better, both in Socrates’ days (classical era) and in the present age abides. Although Socrates’ proposed method of reaching philosopher kings is untenable, in Socrates’ political and philosophical thought, there is one measure that can greatly help in attaining this goal. This element or measure is education or learning. 

 Education plays an indispensable role in fostering enlightenment and in improving problem-solving endeavors in both personal and formal arrangements such as government, entrepreneurship, medicine, and defense, both in the classical and modern eras. For instance, Saccarelli (2007) divulges that even Socrates himself learned under Diotima of Maninea, the Pythian Oracle (who taught him philosophy), and Asphasia of Miletus (who taught him rhetoric).

 One factor remains salient in both Socrates’ days and the present age. This factor is education since scholars were highly regarded in the classical era. In the same way, the field of academics and knowledge opens limitless paths to many values, both at the interpersonal and societal levels.