Position:Home>Philosophy> What is The Rebublic by Plato about?

Contrary to popular opinion, the Republic is not Plato's view of the Ideal society!. Socrates makes it clear at the beginning of book four that the ideal city is being constructed for one purpose: to see clearly what justice exactly is!. More precisely, Socrates uses an analogy to better explain this principle!. I will do my best to paraphrase it by using a better concept: imagine you are taking an eye test!. While taking the eye test you realize you cannot see the small letters because you have poor eyesight!. Let's fancy ourselves in believing that you wanted to trick the doctor so you didn't have to where glasses!. Wouldn't you consider it a true blessing to see a pattern moving from the larger letters to the smaller!? ABCD abcd !.!.!.so on!. You could reason with strong probability that the small letters that you couldn't see were in the same pattern!. Likewise Socrates says constructing the ideal city may better help us to see what justice is!. Once we see clearly what justice is, then perhaps we can reason back to smaller kinds of communities all the way to justice in the individual!. Like the pattern in the letters above, Socrates believes there is something common to all forms of justice and he is out to find what that is in order to determine whether justice is truly good or not!. The first book of the Republic is more Socratic than the rest of the book!. Why!? Socrates often argues about how we define something, and this is the central theme of book one, to define Justice and to discover it's nature!. At the beginning of Book two the reader will discover the aim of Plato's Republic!. Is Justice an intrinsic good!? That is, is it good in itself (an end) and also a means to other things; or, is it just a means to something else, like work!? Is it something we have to do, like working, to fit into society!? If it is something only done to "fit in" so to speak, then it doesn't seem justice is good in and of itself only as a means to "fitting in"!. Socrates' friends, like Socrates, want to believe Justice is intrinsically valuable (a good in itself, like happiness) but are skeptical and implore Socrates to please undertake a long journey to discover whether justice is indeed a good that ought to be sought in itself!. Further, a secondary question is whether justice is actually better than injustice; for it seems that unjust men always get what they want because they don't fear the consequences, while the just men and women are always the ones being treated unfairly!. This is seen in Book two by the masterful illustration "The Ring of Gyges"!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

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It's about Socrates's ideal society!. I always wondered why he cared so much to discuss it and yet do nothing to carry it out!. Was he trying to convince others he was wise so that they may attempt to make him king!?Www@QuestionHome@Com

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