Plato's Philosophy: Soul Purity and Ideal City-State

Plato taught his contemporaries of the idea of the soul and how it has a desire and goal to become a pure. To do this Plato stressed that every human being must compare him or herself to the most high, Godly truth. To accomplish this, humans were expected to live by the universal example by struggling with bodily temptations and sins to be able to keep the soul pure. Plato’s thoughts became the forerunner and basis for many religions in his time and overall applied to all humans as a code of how to live. These platonic principles influenced his opinion on how an ideal city-state should function based on its inhabitants. Dialogues such as The Republic, demonstrate how beings from his time and now in the modern world should conduct themselves;

For example, in the dialogue Socrates stresses, “Then the man who 's going to be a fine and good guardian of the city for us will in his nature be philosophic, spirited, swift, and strong" (Republic 376). Plato starts with the head of the city-state, its leader. He recognizes citizens can only strive to be as good as the example they are given so their ruler has the great responsibility of emphasizing how important it is for every human to embody spiritual characteristics such as courage or arête, having greatness in all things. When a leader is well versed in all aspects and has the strength to not succumb to his or her own desires it promotes the criticalness of all beings constantly achieving universal truth and purity of the soul. Plato also made his beliefs heard when Socrates makes the claim, “Then our job as founders... is to compel the best natures to go to the study which we were saying before is the greatest, to see the good and to go up that ascent" (Republic 519). Plato signifies the importance of a city embodying moral excellence. This constant strive for justice walks hand in hand with happiness; when the focus is reverted from material and bodily temptations such as wealth and power to the idea of justice and morality. The definitions

Democracy in America is still very flawed; it was built on the importance of wealth, which enables beings that don’t value justice and happiness more susceptible to falling into bodily temptations and becoming corrupt. Plato fixes these issues by addressing platonic education and explains how it would implement the importance of morality over greed and desire which thus creates a soul full of justice and happiness which then emanates within that person’s community. Socrates addresses attention to this in the Republic by saying, "Too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery" (Republic 564). Plato recognizes that when there is too much freedom it causes uninformed decisions of citizens and that freedom actually causes citizens to become slaves, slaves to their temptations and sins and that emanates a society defined by materialism and personal gain. Based on these assumptions that were heavily derived from Plato’s observation of Athens, it justifies that when platonic education is implemented in a society it hinders more chance of uninformed votes and placements of politicians in our government. Elections today in the United States are heavily based on favoritism and glorification in the media but instead need to be replaced of searching for a candidate who symbolizes good moral deeds and godly truth as well as possessing arête to then induce arête in