Due to the Corona Panic, I have had more time on my hands than usual, and I have been finishing up something I started many moons ago, Plato’s Republic. I listened to an audiobook of it, and I find that it is beyond me. Certain logical steps I can follow, but I am stymied by some of the twists the dialogue takes.
To quote Aldous Huxley, “It all seems to me quite horrible.”
Yet, I wonder if I have not misunderstood something. There is an idea in the work of imagining the perfect society as a means of perceiving what a perfectly Just individual would be like. The described members of this society seem inhuman at times, and given what appears a contradictory nature: on one hand, the rulers of the city are to engage in a nearly unrestrained sexual appetite, and yet on the other hand, are so disciplined, or conditioned, as to want nothing of personal ownership over anything. This may be the difference of ancient Greek culture as compared with my own, but perhaps these dissonant aspects can be smoothed over when considering the goal, to understand Justice.
These are not real people, but are, in a sense, a collective analogous to an individual, a way to consider the inner life of a Just man. The major restrictions on the sexual appetite, the procreative appetite, of the rulers is that the individual be good stock, be virtuous. There is a sense in which an individual is ruled by ideas, and that those ideas join creatively inside a person. It is the good ideas which should be allowed to join and create new ideas, and the bad ones should not.
Anyway, I am still unconvinced, but I believe Socrates wise: I must endeavor to understand this work before I judge it.
Tale Told 