by Alysha Brady

Created on: January 09, 2009

"You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation." In marketing textbooks, this advertisement is noted as an example of a strategy that could have backfired. The watchmaker ran the risk of disconnecting the buyer; by "never actually [owning]" the watch, consumers might not reach a point of need realization that would serve as the catalyst in their purchasing decision. Plato's Republic runs a similar risk. Plato doesn't take the reader through a series of points and steps they must go through to achieve wisdom; instead, he presents a line of travel. Geometric lines, by definition, have no discernable beginning or end points. The same is true for Plato's line; Plato believed that learning, the vehicle to a better life, never ends.

The line is first divided into two sections the visible and the intellect. Within the visible half there are two parts: the imagination (the prisoners looking at the shadows of the wall of the cave) and the belief (looking at the statues inside the cave). The intellect also has two parts: thought (looking at the objects in the world outside the cave) and understanding (looking at the sun it is important to note that you can never really see the sun because of its blinding light). In the visible half, images are the higher form of knowledge, but in the intelligible half, images become the lower form, subordinate to intangible forms.

The process of traveling along this line is learning, learning in a sense of understanding, but not reasoning a "learning higher than opinion but still lower than ultimate knowledge." Since there is no defined end on a line, the student has two options: either keep learning indefinitely and deal with uncertainty, or become complacent in exchange for personal stability. In Greek society, though, Plato's readers would have had only one choice.

The Greeks valued wisdom and the courage necessary to pursue it. Any Greek citizen would have felt it was their national duty to continuously pursue learning. Complacency would have been equated with laziness. It was considered noble, and a fundamental of logic, to resist being guided by unquestioned opinion. Learning without questioning was like learning under compulsion, and "knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind;" in fact, it is only through questioning that one can truly understand. Plato, and others of his time, believed that "the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already"

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