Socrates: Moreover, you must not wonder that those who attain to this beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell; which desire of theirs is very natural, if our allegory may be trusted. Socrates: And is there anything surprising in one who passes from divine contemplations to the evil state of man, misbehaving himself in a ridiculous manner; if, while his eyes are blinking and before he has become accustomed to the surrounding darkness, he is compelled to fight in courts of law, or in other places, about the images or the shadows of images of justice, and is endeavoring to meet the conceptions of those who have never yet seen absolute justice?
And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den. Socrates: But then, if I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes.
Socrates: Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.
Socrates: And must there not be some art which will effect conversion in the easiest and quickest manner; not implanting the faculty of sight, for that exists already, but has been turned in the wrong direction, and is looking away from the truth?
Socrates: And whereas the other socalled virtues of the soul seem to be akin to bodily qualities, for even when they are not originally innate they can be implanted later by habit and exercise, the virtue of wisdom more than anything else contains a divine element which always remains, and by this conversion is rendered useful and profitable; or, on the other hand, hurtful and useless.
Did you never observe the narrow intelligence flashing from the keen eye of a clever rogue—how eager he is, how clearly his paltry soul sees the way to his end; he is the reverse of blind, but his keen eyesight is forced into the service of evil, and he is mischievous in proportion to his cleverness. Socrates: But what if there had been a circumcision of such natures in the days of their youth; and they had been severed from those sensual pleasures, such as eating and drinking, which, like leaden weights, were attached to them at their birth, and which drag them down and turn the vision of their souls upon the things that are below—if, I say, they had been released from these impediments and turned in the opposite direction, the very same faculty in them would have seen the truth as keenly as they see what their eyes are turned to now.
Socrates: Yes, and there is another thing which is likely. Socrates: Then, the business of us who are the founders of the State will be to compel the best minds to attain that knowledge which we have already shown to be the greatest of allthey must continue to ascend until they arrive at the good; but when they have ascended and seen enough we must not allow them to do as they do now.
Socrates: I mean that they remain in the upper world: but this must not be allowed; they must be made to descend again among the prisoners in the den, and partake of their labours and honors, whether they are worth having or not.
Glaucon: But is not this unjust? Ought we to give them a worse life, when they might have a better? Socrates: You have again forgotten, my friend, the intention of the legislator, who did not aim at making any one class in the State happy above the rest; the happiness was to be in the whole State, and he held the citizens together by persuasion and necessity, making them benefactors of the State, and therefore benefactors of one another; to this end he created them, not to please themselves, but to be his instruments in binding up the State.
Paul Shorey, vol. With the three provided readings, Plato 's 'The Apology ', and his allegory of the cave, that features in his rather lengthy work 'The Republic ', along with Voltaire 's 'Story of the Good Brahmin ', I believe it would be a good idea to set out what philosophical ideas are apparent in each of these extracts, before comparing my interpretation of them to each other.
Following this I will briefly give my own ideas surrounding the themes raised in these extracts. The first work that …show more content… The allegory of the cave is written in support of his theory of forms, which seeks to show that the world as we know it is made up of only a representation of reality and is not reality itself.
There is also a world of ideals, the world of forms, which contains the reality of which our perceived world is only a representation. The allegory of the cave seeks to demonstrate the contrast between these worlds by showing the contrast between our world and one in which only the shadows generated from our world are perceived. Uploaded by Unknown on July 24, Internet Archive's 25th Anniversary Logo. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass.
User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up Log in. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. God did not say that Socrates is ignorant, it is only Socrates himself who makes that claim, and therefore it is he, and not God, who generally attributes im- perfection to the wisdom of men. He willingly shares the name with others, since everyone can also become the wisest in the human sense.
What does God attribute to him if he does not speak of him in this statement? The possibility of low- ering him somewhere to the level of the clumsy Athenian Socrates cannot be taken seriously in the light of what has been said above. In the first sentence, I accept F. God does not say about Socrates that which applies to human wisdom which may belong to anyone who reflects on his ignorance. What he would say positively about Socrates himself is not stated in the text.
Aristotle, Met. Sophocles, Ant. So what answer is expected from the Athenians — and also from the con- temporary reader? Given the role of Socrates as a sovereign thinker on the one hand and the authority that stems from his divine and daemonic charac- ter on the other, I think the answer is not far from that given in the Republic which similarly puts forth the picture of the philosopher whose exceptional intellectual and moral character includes — this time explicitly — a claim to take the leading position in the city.
One has to re- member the conditionality of the philosophical rule — the philosopher has no duty to aspire to ruling position against the will of his fellow-citizens Resp. The discouraging daimonion in the Apology reveals this systematic conditionality of the philosophical rule which, however, as such is not invalidated only by its current impossibility in Athens.
Socrates walks around the city, exercising his specific political authority over his fellow-citizens, but is unwilling to go up to the Assembly, the embodiment of the current problems of democratic politics. It can be recalled that the Prytaneum is a place where the most revered guests — foreigners — are fed by the city.
In his foreign, and therefore, as we already know, philosophical identity, So- crates is willing to ascend to this sovereign position. And it is precisely the Acropolis where, according to the Republic and the Laws, the real rulers of the city live, namely the philosopher-kings Resp.
IX,b3; Leg. XII,e— e, c1—2. This question is, as I have tried to show in a series of works on the first tetralogy and on the Laws,38 systemati- cally connected with the question of the feasibility of the best constitution. The philosopher—king, as the only one, can do many works, dealing with both philosophy and ruling at the same time, which in his case is, in the end, one and the same activity.
Horn — J. Jinek eds. Augustin , pp. Maffi ed. Thein — J. Jirsa — J. However, as we have already indicated, this for- eignness does not contradict the rooting of Socrates in the legislation of his own city, which is especially emphasized by the Athenian laws in the Crito. Let us now examine how the figure of the philosopher-king relates to the laws of his city of origin.
Socrates is directly appealing to a number of Athenian laws: His repeated requests to the jurors not to shout during his speech are based on a law that protected the speaker from interruption. This seems absolutely crucial for the success of the defense, as its time was — also legally — limited. Socrates further appeals to jurors not to violate their oath to judge not on the basis of personal impressions, and thus, for example, on aroused emotions, but merely on the basis of laws 35b—d.
The final argument against Meletus is also legalistic — Socrates states that it is not lawful to bring someone who sins unintentionally to court, but only those who re- quire punishment and not instruction 26a3, 6. We also mentioned above that the indictment was read aloud, because in the case of public disputes, and therefore also in the case of an indictment of impiety, it had to be submitted in written form.
Against the background of Athenian legislation, the whole conclusion of the work can be read, when Socrates proposes punishment for himself 36b ff. It is essential that Socrates himself is committed to obey the law. He ex- plains his willingness to defend himself in court with a pun connecting obe- dience to the law and to God 19a. Although at first it seems that Socrates will want to ridicule this procedural law by an ironic proposal of reward in the form of a lifelong meal in the Prytaneum; see above instead of punish- ment, in the end his seriousness and his respect for Athenian law prevail.
In a sense, Socrates can even be considered the only Athenian who follows the law consistently, due to his perfectly unique practice of not persuading his jurors with emotion. According to reports from the 4th century, it was Solon who established the popular courts and their respective procedures.
IV,e—a; cf. Plato himself identifies with it too, although the scholarship constantly reminds us of his alleged anti-democratic sentiments. VI,a ff. It is possible that they will also operate in the very best constitution, because the exclusion of liti- gation here applies only to the class of guardians see Resp.
The rule of philosophers, and thus the aristocratic constitution, is by no means pre- cluded by the existence of democratic laws.
First, Socrates complains about the lack of time in his defense, and there- fore also about the specific Athenian law, according to which capital trials were to be decided in a single day. Aristotle, Ath. II,12,b35—a5; Isocrates, Or. Crossmann, Plato Today, London , pp. Arnason — K A. Raaf- laub — P. Wagner eds. See also above, note Against this provision, Socrates — apparently the Socrates the Foreigner — invokes differing legislation in other cities 37a—b.
If we look at the Laws, we see that this point is thoroughly discussed here. Instead of dividing the day, the trial itself is divided here, both in terms of time, when a sufficient period is reserved for the trial of capital crimes, and in terms of the possibility of appeal to higher courts Leg.
This must have been regarded as a very arbitrary procedure by Plato and it is again the subject of rather a lengthy correction in Book IX of the Laws.
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