Plato's Republic

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The Philosopher King stands far above others in ancient Athens. At his own peril, amidst constant political chaos and corruption, Plato takes a brave stand for justice, for freedom, and for equality. The Republic, written around 375 B.C., isn't just Plato's treatise on the ideal state, nor is it just a state-of-mind journey from ignorance to enlightenment. Plato also taught at his Academy, the first university in Europe, that political science is the science of the soul. Indeed, Plato's wisdom is a striking example of visionary perfection, where a pure idea of virtue allows the greatest possible human freedom in accordance with laws by which the freedom of each is made to be consistent with that of all others. The Republic also denotes a strong philosophic conviction, where the temporal is only a shadow of the eternal, and that ultimately, "the human soul is responsible not simply to itself but to God." In addition, the Republic's allegorical contrasts between objective reality and empirical observation is the intuition of the form of the good revealed mathematically. This pure knowledge releases the true philosopher from the shadows and illusions of information derived from sensory observation. Plato explains that "what gives the objects of knowledge their truth, and the knower's mind the power of knowing, is the form of the good. It is the cause of knowledge and truth, and we will be right to think of it as being itself known, and yet as being something other than, and even more splendid than, knowledge and truth." The cave allegory does not stand alone in the Republic, for it is best understood as a successful philosophical conclusion to a trilogy of allegories. This trilogy, expressed in beautiful pictorial and poetic fas... ... middle of paper ... ...with them, for they have their own reality. This state-of-mind journey ends as it begins in the Republic, with the moral and intellectual condition of the average person. Plato defined this condition as an initial illusion, where thoughts without content are empty, and intuitions without concepts are mere shadowy notions of opinion, and not pure knowledge. In the cave analogy, prisoners restrained since childhood to look straight ahead at reflected shadows gain an uncritical, careless acceptance of the shapes of men and animals, made of stone and wood, thrown by the fire. A liberated prisoner experiencing the lack of sight during the transition either from light to darkness, or from darkness to light, recognizes that the same thing applies to the mind. The form of the good, once seen, is inferred to be the brightest of all realities, "the truth known only to God".

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