BOOK REVIEW: 'The Republic' by Plato

BOOK REVIEW: Plato’s ‘The Republic’

“We must learn not to hold our hurts and waste our time crying, like children who’ve bumped themselves, but to train our mind to cure our ills and rectify our lapses as soon as it can, banishing sorrow by healing it.”

This is a book that tackles the problem of being a just man in an unjust society. And at surface when the problem was first posed by the interlocutor Thrasymachus, it seemed that it was more profitable to be unjust – that is, to live for oneself without the burdening conscience of the disadvantages your wealth and good life brings to others. For this kind of man can be known and praised to be good by all, and also live with all his favourite pleasures in the absence of any suffering.

To contrast this to the truly just man – it seems he gets absolutely nothing. For since he does not chase after money, he gets none of it, and because he never does his good works openly, he is not even considered by others to be just, but even worse, is prone to be considered unjust.

Seeing this uncanny contrast, Socrates(main interlocutor) is given the following problem to tackle, that is, to:

“Prove to us therefore, not only that justice is superior to injustice, but that, irrespective of whether gods or men know it or not, one is good and the other evil because of its inherent effects on its possessor.”

And by the end of this book, we learn that the flower which Christ planted on Earth, had its affirming roots to uphold it long before!

But what is then the answer which Plato offers? Can I lead a life of pleasures and satisfy all my desires whilst still call myself a lover of wisdom, a lover of the good? Is there anything wrong with accumulating wealth for my own personal benefit – to work and labour to accrue pleasures for myself? Is it right to scorn our desire to be rich and wealthy?

Unfortunately – in my personal opinion - he does not answer these questions, but enlightens us with a provoking response: if we prove that the justice of the state(the behaviour of government and leading authorities) is the same and equally significant as the justice of the individual, in that they entail the same behaviour, how different would it be from our current, corrupt one?

And, if this is true(which it is), it must mean that the justice of the individual operates regardless of whether he/she lives in an unjust state. Plato elaborates thus:

“So we must assume that, if the just man is poor or ill or suffering from any other apparent misfortune, it is for his ultimate good in this life or the next. For the gods will never neglect [b] the man whose heart is set on justice and who is ready, by pursuing excellence, to become as like god as man is able.”

There is this here an understanding of the afterlife as heaven for the just man and hell for the unjust – but this is only surface level. If it is for his ultimate good in this life, what is the extent to which his accumulating wealth and satisfying his desires mar this in his soul? Consider Plato’s discussion below:

“But a man of sound and disciplined character, before he goes to sleep, has wakened his reason and given it its fill of intellectual argument and inquiry; his desires he has neither starved nor indulged, so that they sink to rest and don’t plague the highest part of him with their joys and sorrows, but leave it to pursue its investigations unhampered and on its own, and to its endeavours to apprehend things still unknown to it, whether past, present or future; the third, spirited, part of him he calms and keeps from quarrels so that he sleeps with an untroubled temper. Thus he goes to rest with the other two parts of him quietened, and his reasoning element stimulated, and is in a state to grasp the truth undisturbed by lawless dreams and visions.”

There is this clear sense of balance that is needed for one’s bank of desires, but not a complete eradication of them – but what is this balance? I cannot find a satisfactory answer!

Overall, this was a very provoking read and helps us to consider how individual action can contribute to building a better society at large.