Free To Be Free

The reason Plato called his book The Republic is that it's about the care and feeding of a morally upright State more than it is about individual ethics or morality. And Plato's Socrates has a highly-controlled situation in mind. Having made it to the end of Part III, I've been expecting the book to reveal that it's actually parody, given that Plato seems to be laying the groundwork for a stereotypical dystopia.

Interestingly, one of the critiques of the character of Socrates given back in Part I is that he never actually lays out his definitions of things; rather he asks others to define things, and then, if he disapproves, sets out to refute them. This is a criticism that may be made of the book as a whole, at least so far. For instance, I think, given the way that things are shaping up, that Plato is defining a "free" State as one that is free from being controlled by people foreign to it. The flourishing person appears to have little need for other freedoms, Plato's Socrates is adamant that even the music they listen to be subject to approval by the State.

The book may as well have been titled Why Athens Sucks, and it's pretty clear that Plato is pursuing grievances here, and basing a lot of things on the simple idea the he knows better then everyone else. He has, for instance, determined that the gods must be perfectly moral, and so much of Greek mythology, which tends to appear to us as the humanization of the seemingly capricious forces that people have to deal with on a daily basis, would be suppressed as both lies and corrosive to public morality. A public morality that is apparently unable to take hold unless people are scrupulous protected from any hint that bad behavior exists until well into adulthood. Given that the book has promised to explain to us why being Just is inherently better than being Unjust, it seems odd that Plato is apparently convinced that Injustice seduces people with the slightest whisper.

I hadn't really understood how influential Plato was before embarking on this. Now that I'm reading it, however, I can see a number of Platonic ideals that lasted well into history. It's a remarkable thing, how a single work like this managed to shape so much of what came after it, simply by virtue of surviving long enough to become widely-read and influential.