The Republic by Plato [Book 6]

This book continues the discussion of book 5 and discusses the philosophy of government by philosophers who are guardians with two main traits: love for true being and truthfulness. Love for true being is a very generous thing and can be expected of the highest class of a state but truthfulness in what sense? Truthfulness to the public? or to the cabinet? or towards oneself? or in everything? Truthfulness in everything might make the things rough on his side. Well, Socrates makes it clear that love of knowledge and non-acceptance of falsehood in one's mind is what is desirable to be a good guardian. I accept that. Corruption of mind lead towards the corruption of environment and eventually in the corruption of the people of weaker willpower and weaker memory. Talking about the nature of majority of people, Socrates points out that most of the people are of weak nature; they can't do neither very good nor very bad which makes them unsuitable for leadership position. Agreed. But throughout his discussion, he emphasis on a guardian to be a hardcore philosopher which I do not understand. Yes, a philosopher understands the nature of life better but as Socrates said before, "focus on one thing makes us weak in other directions", which means that focus on war will make a guardian weak in other areas, for e.g., the philosophical approach towards state. A counter argument can be made that a guardian is a perfect blend of philosophy and war tactics but I want to know whether this perfection is practically possible? If it is possible, then why need a cabinet at all? You will just need some officers to implement what you command and that's all.

The second most important and one of toughest things to understand in The Republic is the philosophy of goodness and the example of the line that is used to simplify that philosophy. When Socrates is asked whether goodness is a knowledge or pleasure, he gives an example of sun where all the life on earth is generated because of the sun rays that fall on earth but there is no life on sun. Which means that the essence of goodness is nothing but the essence of knowledge and pleasure that generates from goodness, which in this case is sun. To clarify more, he given an example of a line of two unequal parts where these to unequal parts go further division in the same proportion making four subdivisions of those two parts. Now, the first section of division is the visible section that we see through our eyes and other section is the intelligible section that we perceive as shadows and make our opinions with. Now, what we imagine comes from the images we see and then we idealize it with the eyes of our mind and use hypothesis to prove it in the real world but start and end in ideas which lies beyond hypotheses which shows that reason comes first, understanding second, faith third and perception of shadows to the last. Well, my understanding says that everything comes from that one thing (line in this case) and divides up into many things out of which we could sense only some things. If I am right in getting the point then I think it goes perfectly fine with the Upanishads too where they talk about the the shapeless conscious element which originates every other thing.