Great Ideas of Philosophy

establish a highly disciplined regime of early instruction. Further, to eliminate greed and resentment, theremust be no money payments or property ownership in the community, and both wives and children must bepossessed in common by the community itself.B. Glaucon asks how the state will arrange to have a pool of suitable offspring to become guardians, and thescheme Socrates puts forth is pure eugenics, selective breeding for the purpose of acquiring those with theright natural endowments for the vital role of guardian.C. Glaucon points out to Socrates that even good breeding may produce worthless offspring, and sometimes,mediocre parents have heroic children. Socrates says that undesirable infants are to be exposed. The statehas no need for what it cannot use.V. We now turn to the problem of knowledge as dealt with in Plato’s Republic, where it figures centrally becauseSocrates must justify positions that seem to go against what most Athenians would take for granted.A. The problem of knowledge is illustrated in Republic famously in the “allegory of the cave.” In the cave,men are shackled and can see only a wall on which shadows are projected; they take the shadows forreality.1. Being shackled is equivalent to being a material object, being tied to a body.2. The shadows are taken for real, just as men take their own passions and points of view for the onlytruth, as Protagoras argues.3. When one of the prisoners in the cave breaks his chains and climbs to the light, he sees what neverbefore had been seen and begins to recognize that everything he had taken as true was just someshadowy illusion.4. When this prisoner returns to the cave to inform his cohorts of his experience, they believe that he hasbeen blinded by the light. In the allegory, the “light” is the guidance of the philosopher to universaltruths.B. We begin to recognize that the problem of knowledge is going to return always to a search for what isuniversally true, for a search for relationships, because it is the relationship that constitutes the true form.1. The question “What is it that makes a government good?” must be answered in terms of certainrelationships that obtain between the governing body and those governed, between the laws and thosewho are fit for the rule of law, and so on.2. Justice, too, is understood as the harmonious relationship among the rational, the passionate, and theemotional dispositions of the soul.C. The Republic offers a rigorously behavioristic theory of moral and civic development. Children must beprotected, for example, against the corrupting influence of dithyrambic music. Children must also betrained in the disciplines of the good soldier.D. To return to the story of Gyges, the point of the dialogue is not to examine what people will do if they wereable to make themselves invisible. The point of philosophy is to determine how people ought to behave,not how they do behave.1. Socrates recognizes that people are corporeal entities, inclined by pleasure and pain. He says that wemight regard ourselves as charioteers, pulled by both a good horse and a bad horse.2. The metaphor of the chariot and the good and bad steed is also found in the Katha Upanishads: “Knownow the soul [atman] as riding in a chariot. He who lacks understanding, whose mind is not constantlyheld firm, his sense is uncontrolled, like the vicious horses of a chariot driver.”3. We see from India to Athens this useful metaphor of the impulses of the body being like an untamedsteed, pulling us in one direction. Socrates recognizes that we must have a will capable of resolvingitself to follow the right course of action.4. The will itself cannot determine the right course of action, and desire knows only one course ofaction—that by virtue of which it fulfills itself. How, then, do we discover the right course of action?The answer is through the supremacy of reason, which in turn, is a reflection of our recognition thatmathematical proportion, harmony, and balance must be the guides and the goals of life.Recommended Reading:Plato. The Republic and Protagoras, in The Dialogues of Plato, 2 vols. B. Jowett, trans. Random House, 1937.26©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership