The Republic

The foundational philosophical book that covers the various definitions of justice; the types of political regimes, and the inner makeup of the individual soul. It provides the first outlines of what we would now term as political science.

This work can provoke a wide variety of responses from an approval of a farseeing progressive prophet of sorts to; on the opposite end, utter horror at the outline for a dystopian nightmare.

It deals both with ontology, being, and telos, end; it probes issues of nature versus nurture and of the role of education.

A book worth reading, arguing with, and thinking about. There is barely a topic on life, including modern life, that is not touched upon in the Republic. ( )

Plato obviously has the quarrel with Homer where story, which had always been dominant, gets challenged by philosophy for the first time. But in some ways Plato is quite balanced in terms of the purpose of philosophy and the life of the mind.

On the one hand he speaks out against being a valetudinarian where the only purpose of life is health— where you spend your whole life doing nothing but trying not to die or feel any discomfort before eventually failing in this your only goal. This can be like until I just been said about “housewife-ery expanding to fill the time available”: in other words if all you do is cook and clean and maybe watch TV then you’ll find things to cook, things to clean and things to watch on TV until you don’t have time left to do anything else—until the only thing left is your private comfort.

On the other hand, and without knowing too much about them, unfortunately, Plato is not I think like Kant and Hegel and the philosophers of the 18th century; it’s not about thinking about nothing else except the act of thinking until you die having done nothing but thought. Plato is clear that his guardians are not philosophers only; they have to be soldiers, which means attending to the body; and they have to fulfill a life of service in politics not because politics ought to reward those to do the politicking, but because it ought to be done by the best people, men and women, for the sake of the community and in its service.

The mind is therefore not something to be forgotten, or something to be cultivated in privileged isolation, but a necessary tool for the improvement of people.

How profound and all-encompassing this book is. If this is what philosophy is supposed to be, make it double! ( )

A Socratic dialogue, authored by Plato around 375 BC, concerning justice, the order and character of the just city-state, and the just man. It is Plato's best-known work, and has proven to be one of the world's most influential works of philosophy and political theory, both intellectually and historically.

In the dialogue, Socrates talks with various Athenians and foreigners about the meaning of justice and whether the just man is happier than the unjust man. They consider the natures of existing regimes and then propose a series of different, hypothetical cities in comparison, culminating in Kallipolis, a utopian city-state ruled by a philosopher-king. They also discuss the theory of forms, the immortality of the soul, and the role of the philosopher and of poetry in society. The dialogue's setting seems to be during the Peloponnesian War. ( )

Strange how something written 2500 years ago can feel so modern, but as a friend told me, politics is always politics.

There are several themes in this book that I picked up. There is the attempts to define justice, or right-wrong, just-unjust.

There are the attempts to define the optimal civilization. Sounds a bit naïve, but interesting thought experiment.

There are discussions about pain and pleasure and the relative nature of them.

There are discussions about the flaws in various forms of governments, which focuses on a aristocracy/monarchy controlled by humble philosophers as the optimal, or only working government form.

All of these discussions are interesting, and few things are obsolete. ( )