A Justified Criticism of Platos The Republic essays

A Justified Criticism of Platos The Republic essays Platos The Republic has taken the ancient and contemporary world by storm, inciting both birth and death of paradigms concerning the state and society. By that phenomenon, it brought with it a gush of relentless controversy while revealing and yet concealing subjectively realities on the emptiness and incompleteness of human existence. Some may probably have perceived it as a rational approach to politics, some a repression of the free human spirit, while some may probably view it as a mere product of a delusive mind. However the existence of these convictions, each of us must try to take his own stand by examining and weighing its value or even figuring if it does possess any. Taking the tone of the rhetoric, we shall embark on the whole course of this worthwhile journey guided by the question, could the philosophies presented in Platos writing in fact be useful to mankind or should it remain but a far-fetched fantasy nature would never allow to materialize? For some reason, the form in which Plato preferred to chronicle into account the ideas of his mentor, Socrates, was by the form the dialogue. The discourse opens with a conversation with Adeimantus on the main subject of inquiry-justice. Socrates then suggests how the concept can, in its full effect, be integrated into a community by mentally conceptualizing the ideal state. One noteworthy statement with which he founded his construction: A state comes into existence because no individual is self-sufficing; we all have many needs. Such a profound and heavy thought. He then proceeds with enumerating the needs of a state and supposedly assigning each man to work towards sufficing each need according to what vocation of profession naturally befits the citizen. Each man, according to Socrates is born meant for a certain purpose and a certain duty, which he must strictly adhere to during his lifetime to maintain order, and later, what we are to di...