"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" and, as a result, it was a given that men were responsible for using this skill.
The journey along the line inherently incorporated the three main virtues in Greek society: self discipline (making oneself travel along the line of learning), courage (willingly face the multitude of unknowns), and thinking of the common good. This third virtue cannot be summarized as succinctly as the others, but for the Greeks it was still very obvious. They believed that to have a good life meant having a good city; society must transcend the individual and reach a "state mentality," where each person examines how his actions would impact the state. Therefore, the learned individual would become a learned state, and a learned city would in return make life good for its citizens; as Plato wrote, "the happiness was to be in the whole State." Greek citizens were expected to give up the comfort of certainty; certainty would be equated with the third realm of the soul the part controlled by the desire for "pleasures and appetites." Plato recognized that everyone had these desires, but he called for them to be controlled by the highest realm of the soul reason which also controlled the state. Reason was a hard to obtain virtue, so individuals would spend a lifetime searching for it along this one-dimensional line. Instead of defining what the good is, Plato instructs his readers that to obtain the good, they need to constantly strive for more perfect reasoning. In the end, it turns out, not being able to see the end point of the line didn't matter to Plato or the Greeks they believed that learning was a life-long task.
Even though the journey along the line would be full of unknowns, the Greeks had a very clear sense of need recognition. They realized that their society depended on each individual transcending the image and striving for the intellect; this personal development of each citizen would lead to the collective development of the state, which was the ultimate goal. Plato knew that people should keep searching for knowledge because the learning process never ends, and he also knew that short-term uncertainties could be dealt with as people focus on long-term development. Patek Philippe learned this most important lesson too and now uses it as the cornerstone of its marketing plan: perpetual development over the course of several generations is more important than short-term comforts.