I’m currently taking a philosophy course from Hillsdale College with my husband, and that piqued my interest in reading “The Republic.” I’d read just a couple of small segments of it before: the cave analogy, and the Ring of Gyges when I was researching for I think “The Atlantis Bloodline.” I mean, I guess it’s silly to say this, because everybody already knows this, but it’s brilliant.
First of all, the Socratic method isn’t quite what I thought it was. I’d always understood it to be JUST a series of questions, probing what the other person thought and getting them to articulate their own position and identify their own fallacies in the process, rather than pointing them out oneself. All the while, I thought the questioner maintained the idea that he knew nothing, and therein lay his wisdom. While Socrates does do this some, the majority of the dialogue involves his listeners probing him on the details of his own thinking and opinion, taking his ideas to their logical conclusions. I get the impression that (if this was a faithful representation of his conversations at all,) Socrates was working out his own ideas in the process of the dialogues. Dialogues are also a much easier read than straight prose essays on philosophical ideas, which are often dull as dirt. These read almost like a novel. I found myself wondering if any of his interlocutors were based on real people.
While the purpose of the Republic is to describe the ideal city, Socrates has to start by identifying what constitutes an inherent good–whether there is value in the various virtues in and of themselves, or whether they are a means to something else. This is brilliant, and should be required reading for every high school student–especially these days, when so many are confused about concepts of right and wrong. In the process of this exploration, Socrates ends up describing why the youth should not study the stories of the Greek gods, because they teach them bad values (interesting when we recall that Socrates was put to death for heresy)… and then he goes on to describe what God must be like, from just the standpoint of logical consistency. My jaw dropped, as this philosopher from before the time of Alexander the Great described the Christian God, and only the Christian God, to a T. His theology was better than that of most Christians, and he got there by pure logic, without a Bible or even (presumably) without knowledge of the Jewish Torah.
I’ll have to go back through my notes on this and chew on it some more. But truly, this should be a required text.
My rating: *****
Language: none
Violence: none
Sexual content: none
Political content: none
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