Synopsis for Plato’s Republic books 7-10 PDF

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Synopsis for Plato’s Republic books 7-10. Prof. DePlato...

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Synopsis for Plato’s Republic books 7-10 BOOK VII: this starts with the discussion of the prisoners seeing the shadows and one going up into the light and being enlightened as to what the world really is. The prisoners think that their reality is the shadows; their environment has forced this reality upon them. The new light would pain the one dragged to the top and he would want to go back in the cave, which shows that people turn back to what they know when presented with truth. So this prisoner would need time to get used to the light, just like how it takes time to accept the truth. This prisoner would than be happy to no longer live in the false reality of the prisoners. Once enlightened this man does not wan to go back to the prison, he would rather suffer than go back. It would also be harder for him to associate with the other prisoners. Socrates also notes that it takes time for eyes to adjust to either light or dark, so when you go to or from enlightenment it is harder to see the truth. He says that there is a craft specifically made for turning the soul back to the light. Sometimes turned souls get eviler because of clearer vision, this evil man is not inferior but rather serving vice. Rulers must see the good, “ascend the ascent” (189) they cant be just prisoners or just free people. They must be enlightened (turned to the light) souls. An interesting idea Socrates presents is that “ Law is not concerned in making any one class in the city do outstandingly well” (189) so we can leave some people as prisoners for the greater good perhaps? Out rulers are literally better people because they are better educated and able to share in both types of life (prisoners and in the light). Socrates also addresses the forming of factions in order to rule, could this be similar to perhaps the modern day political parties? The only way to get a good philosopher king is by finding a way of life better than ruling, that way corrupt people wont want to rule for money. The only ones to be guardians of the city are enlightened souls, they also wont desire wealth/power from it because they don’t find honor in that. Now the guardians must be taught how to rule like this, so they must add to their previous teaching with the craft of numbers and calculations. Why this craft? Because all crafts have it so our guardians need it too. The study of numbers, if used correctly draws people towards being, they can lead to the philosophic soul if done right. Socrates next brings up how our senses can give us opposite messages at the same time, such as hard and soft at once. For the soul this is called the intelligible (which summons thought) and the visible (which does not). The thought separates entities but vision does not. Calculations lead to enlightenment because they are thought not vision. Learning numbers will ”lead the soul and turn it around to look at what is.” It pulls it upwards and forces it to discuss the truth of the numbers, leading the person closer to the truth itself. Here Socrates gets more confusing, saying you must use “understanding itself on the truth itself” (193), perhaps referring to understanding the numbers and every part of them? Only lots of knowledge in calculations leads to philosophy, the greater and more advanced part makes it easer to see the good, so you cant be a bad mathematician but a skilled philosopher. Geometry also leads to the philosophical truth. After that solid geometry must be studied by the guardians (as of yet un-researched) and than astronomy will be taught to them. Astronomy also has a way to be taught correctly, and that is that the heavens are models to teach neat things that move as true numbers. So the concepts found in astronomy (but not the natural planets themselves) are what the guardians must

study. After astronomy comes the study of harmony, but it too must have a unique approach, to see which “numbers are in concord and which are not” (197). The last thing to teach is dialectic, it is the ultimate way to get to truth’ it is necessary to all the other studies. All these crafts just discussed take a soul upward, or closer to the truth, but the ultimate theme is dialectic. “All other crafts are concerned with human beliefs and appetites” but only the philosopher seeks the truth through those subjects and dialectic. We find the truth by using dialectic to help pull it out and upward using the crafts/subjects we taught the guardians that help and cooperate it in enlightening or turning the soul to the truth. Next Socrates branches into the idea that knowledge or thought is understanding but opinion or imagination is belief. So dialectic is a capstone to our guardian’s education and the last thing for them to learn. Next, our rulers must be naturally inclined to learn, keen on the subject and learning without difficulty. They must also love hard work, all hard work, and be a master at the work they do. So does that mean they would be a master of all crafts since they would love all hard work? The rulers must be taught when they are young because labor is for the young people. They must also want their education and not be forced into it or they wont remember any of it. The ultimate test to put the guardians through is to see if they can unify their education with all these subjects, if they can than they are truly dialectical and guardian-worthy. However, the practice of dialectic includes the questioning and disproving of our childhood beliefs. When this happens people become lawless. Wouldn’t that mean that dialectic results in bad people? This will happen to our guardians in training if we don’t take special precautions. These precautions are not letting them argue as children, not letting them have believes like that. In the end, the guardians must train just as hard in dialectic as in physical training. Because the ultimate test is sending them back down into the dark cave of prisoners, back to the masses. Those who should pass will be those who don’t seek to rule, women should also be allowed to rule, if they pass all these tests too. It is possible for this city to really happen if you seclude the children and have them raised in this fashion by a few philosophers and start the city with them. BOOK VIII: next Glaucon brings us back to page 147 about the 4 constitutions Socrates had mentioned. These are Cretan and Laconian, oligarchy, democracy, and noble tyranny. The constitutions of the cities parallels the human characters since constitutions arise out of characters. Than Socrates says there is actually 5 ways to describe a soul. First up is the aristocracy, being the most noble and just. And just like the city, a soul ruled like an aristocracy will also be most just. After aristocracy comes timocracy. So the perfect world will fall apart. How? By birth, since Socrates comes up with some equation to maintain in order to get the perfect birthrates (204). The first sign that perfection is gone is when people get less musical, when we stop teaching the stories. Classes will intermix creating factions (or the mixing of golds and bronzes and such what). The guardians will enslave the people as the city further dissolves down the train into lesser just form of constitution. The main difference is that the guardians will want money now, but some aspects of the old city will still be around. Next we discuss what a person who corresponds to our slightly fallen city would be like: more stubborn. Less musical, lover of ruling and honor, lover of physical raining but not musical training (206), as such there will be some problems with his soul. This is the

timocratic city/youth (1 step below aristocracy/perfection). Up next is the oligarchy, which has fallen from a timocracy. This oligarchy is on “in which the rich rule and the poor man does not participate in ruling” (207). The guardian falls even lower into an oligarchy be being victory and honor loving, money loving and praising the wealthy man, appointing the wealthy man as ruler and dishonoring the poor one. Bad rulers will than get appointed on the basis of property assessments and a poor person would be turned away despite better qualifications. There would be a huge class difference between rich and poor to create factions. People would start ignoring their true crafts for the sake of money. People would become a hindrance to the city with short-lived wealth and a squanderer lifestyle, leading to a surplus of poor people. And Socrates asserts that where you see beggars you see thieves because they come from the same cause, just one is eviler than the other. Next up is how a soul would be and fall into an oligarchic state. This happens because he will not letting the calculating side calculate anything but money, and he wont let the honoring side honor anything but money. He would resemble an oligarchy by attaching the greatest importance to money…a money-lover. The oligarchic man is unjust with a just reputation because his little bit of good is holding his bad side in check. He has too many internal factions to understand the value of the harmonious soul. That is the third constitution our city sinks into: “a thrift money-maker corresponds to an oligarchic city” (210). Up next is democracy, which is the 4th constitution our perfect city will dissolve into. In it the rich get richer at the sake of maintaining the young people’s freedom and pleasurable lives. Democracies create more people and increase the drones and masses, kind of sounds like welfare right? Once more the classes are divided because of the way the rich and poor are socialized differently. Democracy comes when the poor masses take over the rich due to internal factions. Once they take over they insist on an equal share of the wealth and ruling offices. Now there is just a ton of freedom, it is the key concept behind democracy. All this freedom creates multifarious people. No order and nor harmony leads the city to fall hard. Next up is how the soul falls from an oligarchic soul to a democratic soul. But we get a little sidetracked here and start talking about what appetites are and are not appropriate. So an appropriate appetite would be one for bread. But an inappropriate appetite would be a picky eater. The masses of a democracy have harmful appetites. A soul falls to a democratic constitution when a good soul tastes the harmful pleasures of the masses and associates with those who provide multifarious pleasures due to too much freedom. Just like the city, the soul has inner factions (between the good and the bad appetites). The bad appetites will eventually drive out the good, a process which is sped up by a lack of education. Eventually he stops being such a partier but treats all his desires as equal which leads him to give into all his desires and means he has no real harmony or virtue. Up next is the last and worst constitution to fall into, the tyranny. “Freedom” the supposed “good” of the democracy is the key factor that causes a democracy to collapse into a tyranny. Why? The rulers get power hungry and start to remove freedoms. People start disobeying what Socrates says is social norms in order to get a democratic state. they act like brats because they’re “free” and can do whatever they want. So when people, or animals, have too much freedom they lose respect for others and society. Hence the ruler of a democracy has no respect for the freedoms of the masses and as such enslaves them. “Excessive action in one direction usually sets up a great reaction in the

opposite direction” (216), so the excessive freedom led to the excessive tyranny. Socrates than says that a democratic city can be divided into three parts” politicians, wealthy, and the masses. The wealthy fund the city, the politicians hold the wealth for themselves, and the masses rely on the rich for their well-being. (sounds so familiar!). or as Socrates says, “The leaders, in taking the wealth of the rich and distributing it to the people, to keep the greatest share for themselves” (217). Eventually the internal factions will create the masses to support one man as their leader, who will turn on the people and become their tyrant, birthed from the popular leader. Once he is a tyrant the people will protect him while the rich flee. He will maintain control by disturbing the peace and creating wars because this will distract the masses from his tyranny. The tyrant would empty the town of the “best” who would oppose him. Eventually the people will stop to like him, so he must hire the outcasts to be his bodyguards. Eventually the tyrant will spend more that he has, and the masses will have to support the monster they created and pay taxes. He will use force to get them to cooperate if they refuse to pay. So this is how we fall into a tyranny from a democracy, so how does a soul fall? BOOK IX: But before we get there, Socrates goes off on a tangent again about the nature and number of a person’s appetites. In your dreams, your appetitive self takes over and you give into your desires. However, if you use reasoning before sleep and manage your appetite while awake you wont give in to pleasures in your dreams. “passion has long been called a tyrant” (221), so the democratic man gets into passion and falls into tyranny. Passion leads to increased desires and bad appetites, as our democratic soul encounters passion he loses his money and goes into debt. His debt would cause him to steal from and disrespect his parents. The tyrant is not just, because deeds that were just are mastered by the new appetites recently released from slavery. Signs of the unjust man are little evils, more thoroughly described on pg. 222. There are only a few tyrants in a city so they all do little evils, but if there is more than a few that is when you get tyranny. At this time than the most tyrannical would force the other tyrant under him. He is the worst type of man, constantly giving into his desires like the dreaming man does. So the king of the aristocracy is by far the best and the tyrant is by far the worst. The next question is who is happiest and who is wretched? The only way to know that is to see the souls clearly, only done by knowing them closely. Which is what Socrates tries to do next. The soul of the tyrant mimics the city f tyranny, full of slavery. The most of it enslaved and the small insane and wicked part is the master. The tyrannical man will be enslaved, poor, fearful, lamenting, painful just like the city. But the man more wretched than that is the actual tyrant himself, one who actually gets all the power. The tyrant is a slave master who is suddenly at the mercy of his slaves the slaves are the masses. The life of a tyrant is even harsher because he is a man of bad temperament controlling and in fear of the masses. His is definitely miserable, just like how the tyrannical city is miserable. Every kind of vice is in a tyrannical man who becomes a tyrant. So the 5 constitutions in order of most to least happiest is Kingly, timocratic, oligarchic, democratic, and tyrannical. To parallel the 3 elements of the soul (reasoning, spirit, and appetite) there are three primary types of people (philosophic, victory loving and profit loving). Each element claims to be the best, so how do you know which is truly better than the other. Well the

philosopher is more experienced than the profit lover in both knowledge and honor. So the philosopher has the best tool by which to judge and as such has the best element. Judgment is by means of experience, knowledge, and argument. The philosopher has these specialties. As such we establish that the philosopher is the best judge of which is the best element, and so philosophy is the best element. So both in soul and in pleasure the just one wins, he is both happier and better. Next we delve into this land of pain and pleasure and the quiet stillness in-between these two extremes, which is sometimes both pain and pleasure. This means that the absence of one is not the presence of the other (relief from pain is not pleasure but the stillness). So those who don’t know real pleasure think the middle state is real pleasure but only the just and good know real pleasure, at least that is where this seems to be going? Empty souls are filled by learning. A soul who has more true belief, knowledge and understanding has more of a pure and real being, more pleasure perhaps? So being filled with true, pure and actual things causes more pleasure, not just the middle ground. The lesser things (“feed, fatten and fornicate” (23)) are not really filling, the lesser things are appetitive. This is the pleasurable element. The spirited element, which is allied to reasoning, pursues the satisfaction of honor, victory and spiritedness with rational calculation. The philosophic element, which is the best, is the one that follows knowledge and argument, and gets the truest pleasures. When a soul is just it attains the highest pleasures, so justice is a better life than the unjust. Each element must do its own work in the should and enjoy its own pleasures (which is the definition of justice from the city story too). A tyrant will live unpleasantly and a king pleasantly because a king is closer to the truth. A tyrant however is a slave to his desires. The king lives 729x more pleasantly than the tyrant because they are 5 constitutions apart (and some other math, see page 231). Socrates says these numbers are true and appropriate, but I don’t understand how they were proven or who decided they were accurate. The original claim was that the unjust man was happier, but now it is shown that the unjust person is unhappier by 729 times. If someone thinks injustice is profitable, he learns instead that desires create a monster that will bite and fight and devour the warring elements within a soul or city. However justice is profitable because it creates harmony among the 3 elements of the soul. Praising justice is truth, but praising injustice is false, because the unjust soul is torn up and unhappy. The unjust man has enslaved the most “divine element in himself to the most godless and polluted” (233), obviously he is most wretched. The unjust man gives into desires, disharmony, and creates a multifarious beast that has been given too much freedom. Socrates than says that stubbornness, peevishness, luxury and softness, flattery and illiberality all are things that hurt the spirit and the rational element of the soul but feed the appetitive element. For both the individual soul and the city, “ It is better for everyone to be ruled by a devein and wise ruler…so that we may all be as alike and as friendly as possible” (233). Appearing just while being unjust makes one worse on the inside. However, a just soul is more honorable than even glory gained by physical training. So the just man will always be concerned about harmonizing the elements of his soul, even more so than physical training. And his inner harmony will be more important than even the pleasures of the masses. The just man could practice politics in a city, however the just man could never go to the hypothetical city Socrates created because it doesn’t exist anywhere.

BOOK X: At this point Socrates ventures back to what is and isn’t allowed in the city. He has come up with a better reason to not allow poetry in the city. His reasoning takes a moment to get to. He talks about the man who made the first unique form of a couch, and as such was the creator. Than all craftsman who made couches after him were imitators. Than a painter who paints the couch is an imitator or the imitation. Just like how a mirror or painter mimics the items but doesn’t create or produce the real item itself. The 3 factors in these imitations are the painter, the carpenter and god (or nature). “The one whose product is three removed from the natural one is an imitator” (236). The painter imitates the craftsman’s couch which imitates the god’s original true couch. So imitation is far removed from the truth. This man is far removed from the truth and hence making him naive. He claims to know every craft, but no one can know every craft, so he only can imitate every craft. The reason why a poet can t be in the ideal city is because poets claim to know all because they can write about all but we just said this man is far from he truth. As such the poets are not allow...