The Republic by Plato - 14 - Conclusion
Conclusion
Quote
"Plato's willingness to put words into Socrates' mouth demonstrates his own view of history: historical writing involves the discovery of ideas, not of 'historical facts,' which are (after all) mere shadows. If Plato expresses the Ideal (which exists independently of either Plato or Socrates) and does so in a way that Socrates could have used, he is doing accurate history; he is holding to truth." – Susan Wise Bauer
Notes and Key Takeaways
Plato grew up during the Pelopponnesian War which gave him a very low opinion of the masses and of political leaders. He also saw his teacher and hero, Socrates, executed by a democratic society. This made him very critical of democracies, too.
Few people think about The Republic as a history book, especially since it isn't describing a set of historical events. And yet here it is in this history book list. However, as Susan Wise Bauer explains in the quote above, Plato is still pursuing truths about reality, even if it is through an imagined conversation that represents ideas that Socrates could have said. We saw Thucydides do something similar in his recounting of major speeches that various leaders gave throughout the Peloponnesian War, where he explained that the speeches weren't completely accurate to the word but instead an educated guess given the situation and based on what he could remember. Still, a provocative interpretation of history, to be sure.
The irony is that The Republic technically would have been banned under the imagined community that is developed in The Republic, since it is a representational work and all representational works (poetry, painting, etc) were banned. Though Plato might say that The Republic is concerned with truth and reality unlike the poetry he was talking about which only dealt with the appearances of things.
There is an enduring question (which I raised during the readings, too) about whether the society as described in the book is meant to be an actual model for a workable political system, or if it's meant to serve only as an analogy for the psychology of an individual, and how an individual should rule themselves. The main question in the book is about whether or not morality leads to a better life, and Socrates does explain that describing an ideal community will help them to arrive at an answer to that question. There are parts that are for sure an analogy, such as the three classes of citizen matching with the three parts of the mind. But other parts look more like things that Plato would recommend for real life societies, such as the education system, the use of eugenics to control the population, and control over the arts.
Robin Waterfield, the translator for this version of The Republic, writes in his introduction that "Plato does not expect this community ever to be realized." He believes the book's main concern is why and how an individual should pursue a moral life. The mass censorship of the arts is more a way of saying that you should be careful about the kinds of things you're putting into your mind, he argues.
For Plato, philosophy was not about abstract theorizing, it was a way of life. He believed that a commitment to morality was a commitment to God, or true reality — that which is unchanging and eternal. "His purpose was to get his readers to change their lives, to undertake the pursuit of assimilation to God."
Other translations of The Republic use the word 'justice' instead of 'morality'. Robin Waterfield notes that the Greek word involved "refers to something which encompasses all the various virtues and is almost synonymous with 'virtue' in general." The word 'justice' means "acting fairly and impartially towards others". Therefore, in Waterfield's mind, justice is part of what's being talked about, but it isn't the whole. Indeed, morality almost seems to have a religious or spiritual quality to it.
Morality also involved having psychic harmony between the three main parts of your mind — the desirous, the passionate, and the intellectual. Plato believed that our natural state as humans was to allow our desires to take control of our lives, and we need enlightened rulers to save us from ourselves. He really was not a believer in democracy or of the people's ability to rule themselves. You can see this also in his analogy of the cave where people are essentially prisoners whose whole understanding of reality is made up of shadows and illusions. Only the very few are able to escape the cave and glimpse what reality truly is.