Plato‘s REPUBLIC, Book 7, Part 2

Book 7 of REPUBLIC is arguably the most well-known, important and foundational texts in all of Western letters, and no educated person can remain unfamiliar with its teachings. The book opens with the famous Allegory of the Cave, which Plato says is about the education of the soul, its journey from ignorance to knowledge. It must be added to the former allegories of the Line and the Sun to complete the picture of Plato's metaphysics and epistemology:

"This entire allegory ... you may now append ... to the previous argument; the prison-house [Cave] is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world.... [M]y opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of [the] good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eye fixed."

Education, Socrates asserts, is a conversion process, of turning away from what is less real toward that which is more real, toward the transcendent eternal and unchanging realm of the Forms. Our guardians, then, must be taught to "see" the truth of transcendent reality by an ascending process of understanding, culminating in the discipline of dialectic, philosophical reasoning which allows us to "achieve a unified vision." In this way our true guardians will rule the city in the best manner possible, being able to model True Being here in the imperfect realm of becoming. We must, then, discover the disciplines that will lead our philosophers toward Being. It turns out that paradox, those disciplines and experiences that strike our understanding with oppositions that cause us to explore the ideals that lay beyond the mixed-up realm of becoming.

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