The Good, the Line and the
Cave
The Philosopher rulers must know
the Good
The good is a motivator. Everyone pursues
what they believe to be good.
The philosopher kings will know what the
good is. They will therefore pursue what
really is good.
A doctor can know medicine, and yet still
use that knowledge to poison people
A Pilot can know the art of navigation, and
use it to run the ship aground.
Likewise, the mere knowledge of justice is
not by itself going to motivate someone to
be or produce justice.
You have to know not just what justice is,
you need to know that justice is good.
Knowledge of the good is distinctive
because it motivates behavior.
If I know justice is good, then I will want to
produce just things (cities) and be a just
person.
But what is the form of the Good?
The Good is to the intelligible world what the
sun is to the visible world
The sun causes visible things to come into
existence (grow), and it also provides light
so we can see them
The good allows us to “see” , understand,
the forms
The good is also the cause of the existence
of the forms
Because the form of justice derives from
the Good, we know that justice is good.
All the forms are derivied from the good
And since the forms cause the structure of
the sensible world, the Good is the cause
of everything.
What about evil?
If everything derives from the Good, then it
seems everything should be GOOD
But everything is not good.
How can Plato account for the existence of
bad/evil, given that everything derives
from The Good.
One possibility: Evil is a privation
Injustice may not be real property at all
Just as being blind is the lack of sight, so
being bad may be the lack of good.
there is no form of injustice, but there are
various ways in which a person or city can
deviate from the form of justice, become
less like the form.
The Line
The line illustrates the relationship
between the intelligible and sensible
worlds.
In the sensible world, the are both things
and images (objects of belief and objects
of imagination
The objects of imagination are images of
the objects of belief (things)
The sensible world is an image
Likewise the sensible world, ordinary
physical things, are images, imperfect
copies of the ideal forms.
The Cave!
The cave also
illustrates the sensible
and intelligible world.
We are all cave
dwellers, who take
the images of things
to be reality
Questions about the cave
The cave dwellers treat shadows as reality
Shadows correspond to imagination
How does this correspond to ordinary life?
In what way do we confuse imagination
with physical reality (which itself is not
really “real”)
We confuse image with reality when we
take physical things to be what we
perceive them to be, when we fail to
distinguish our perspective on a thing, and
the thing itself
We confuse imagination for reality when
we allow conventional wisdom, the media,
To interpret reality for us.
Why do the philosophers go back
to the cave
The cave, the city, needs rulers. The
philosophers don’t want to be in the cave
(its more fun outside)
But they go back because the ought to .
This the one place in the Republic where
someone clearly acts against their own
self interest.
The cave illustrates why
philosophers make the best rulers
Because the philosophers don’t want to
rule, they will not compete to rule.
Because they know the cave is just a
cave, they will not be corrupted by the
temptations of cave life (wealth etc)
The philosophers have seen reality, they
know the forms. So they are able to make
the modelsin the cave more like the reality
they imitate.