Key Lessons from Plato’s Republic — Book III
Please read from Key Lessons from Plato’s Republic — Book I, as this story is part of a broader series on Plato’s Republic.
Education of the Guardians/Soldiers
The most important function of stories is to immunize the young guardians against a fear of death. The reason for stories over other forms of writing is that it allows the guardians have an idol with ideal values and therefore the stories cannot be about gods, but more so heroes, to whom the guardians can live up to.
Physical training of the guardians is the next topic. This training should resemble the sort involved in training for war, rather than the sort that athletes engage in. He emphasizes how important it is to properly balance the music and poetry with physical training. Too much physical training will make the guardians savage, while too much music and poetry will make them soft.
The Work of an Artist
Arts, such as painting and architecture. In all of these — as in poetry — Socrates forbids the artists to represent characters that are vicious, unrestrained, slavish, and graceless. Any characteristics besides those the guardians should emulate are excluded.
The Work of a Doctor
Socrates prescribes the medical training that should be provided in the Just city. Doctors should be trained to treat the healthy, who suffer from a single, curable ailment. They should not be trained to deal with the chronically ill. Those suffering from an incurable physical disease should be left to die naturally. Those suffering from an incurable mental disease should actively be put to death.
The Reasoning behind such Absolute Ruling and Training
Eros, or proper love, is the emotion that motivates us to ascend to the heights of knowledge. As we will see later, true knowledge does not attach itself to the observable world around us. True knowledge, instead, has as its object the realm of the Forms, the universal, eternal truths that only our mind can access. Although study allows us to make the intellectual leap toward this higher realm, eros provides the emotional motivation for studying.
The health of a man’s soul is determined by the desires he aims to fulfill. A just soul is a soul that pursues the right desires. Desire for physical pleasure is not worth fulfilling. So though the good man, the philosophical man, might have physical desires directed at other people, it is crucial to his virtue that he not act on these; he must not try to satisfy his lust for physical pleasure. Instead, he must transmute that erotic desire into a longing for truth and goodness, and a longing to find this truth and goodness together with his beloved.
Plato’s ideal city has many of the authoritarian aspects come to the fore. Personal freedom is not valued. The good of the state overrides all other considerations. Social classes are rigid, and people are sorted into these classes with no thought to their preferences. Of course, Plato would object to this latter claim by saying that each person will find their class most pleasing to them since it is best suited to their nature. Nonetheless, they are given no input when the state determines what life they will lead. A citizen’s fate — producer, warrior, or ruler — is decided at an early age, and no provisions are made for individuals to shift classes as they mature.
So, as we read through The Republic, we should ask ourselves why we value personal freedom so highly and what we might be sacrificing by placing such a high priority on freedom.
