by Lydia Epstein

Created on: July 26, 2010   Last Updated: August 01, 2010

The Philosopher King's supreme vision of virtue shines down like a ray of light on ancient Athens. At his own peril, amidst constant political chaos and corruption, Plato takes a brave stand for justice, for freedom, and for equality. The Republic, written around 375 B.C., isn't just Plato's treatise on the ideal state, nor is it just the ascent of the mind from opinion to pure knowledge. Plato also taught the aristocrats at the first university in Europe that political science is the science of the soul.

 
For example, Plato's political ideology is a striking example of pure virtue that allows the greatest possible human freedom in accordance with laws by which the freedom of each is made to be consistent with that of all others, That is, each person is a link in the unity of the whole, where society collectively reaps the benefits of each individual contribution to it. Ultimately, "the human soul is responsible not simply to itself but to God".

Contrary to popular belief, the cave allegory in the Republic is not a stand-alone archetype of this pure virtue. Indeed, this philosophical conclusion is best understood as a trilogy of allegories. This trilogy, expressed in beautiful pictorial and poetic fashion, begins with the sun, then moves on the divided line, with a final ascent out of the cave. This journey from ignorance to pure knowledge can also be represented by "the progress of sight from shadows, to the real creatures themselves, and then to the stars themselves, and finally to the sun itself, the form of the good and ultimate objective".

 
The sun allegory begins with a vision of the visible world outside the cave as the source of growth and light, and also the source of reality and truth. The sun gives intelligibility to objects of thought, and the power of knowing to the mind. "And just as it was right to think of light and sight as being like the sun, but wrong to think of them as being the sun itself, so here again it is right to think of knowledge and truth as being like the good, but wrong to think of either of them as being the good, whose position must be ranked still higher."

The journey to pure knowledge also travels across the divided line, and is the intuition of the form of the good revealed mathematically. The mind's eye now moves towards the light of reason, and we encounter basic assumptions that are obvious to students of geometry, astronomy, and harmonics. In other words, Plato advocates Pythagorean philosophy at his academy,

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