Crafting the perfect "Republic"

Plato still rules!

Excerpt: "If you knew you could commit any crime and never get caught, would you still choose a righteous life? Does acting justly lead to greater happiness than injustice? These are the questions that launch the inquiry Plato dramatized in his “Republic,” a work that in antiquity bore the alternate title “On Justice.” The conversation Plato staged in that work, using his former teacher Socrates as leading man and putting his own older brothers into supporting roles, then takes on enormous breadth, veering into discussions of politics, education, the ideal state, and the problem that lies at the root of Platonic philosophy: How do we know what is real and what’s merely illusion?

...Plato has Socrates argue that nothing we see around us is “real” in the truest sense. We live as though in a cave, says Socrates; we watch shadows cast on the walls and suppose we have gained understanding if we learn the patterns by which the shadows appear. Outside our cave lies a sunlit realm, accessible only through long philosophic training. There, the mind can perceive “that which is,” to use Plato’s language—justice and other virtues in their pure form—and be guided to choose right over wrong, even absent the fear of punishment. Those who have made that mental leap must then return to the cave (i.e., unenlightened society) in order to serve as leaders.

The celebrated cave passage of the “Republic” illustrates one of Plato’s most cherished ideas, what’s known as his theory of Forms. Only by grasping perfect, eternal entities—the Forms—with our minds, Plato thought, can we attain knowledge and, thereby, true happiness. Illuminating this abstract realm is Plato’s allegorical sun, the Form of the Good, which diffuses goodness to all other Forms as the sun itself spreads light. Glimpsing this Form, as a devoted philosopher might eventually do, would bring sublime joy. Platonism here overlaps with Christianity, a religion on which it has had a profound influence; Renaissance artists, under Plato’s resurgent sway, often depicted the sun or its light as embodiments of the divine."