Sublime

Philosophy of Right

The next point is that Plato’s definition of “justice” presupposes a State organized either on traditional lines, or, like his own, so as to realize, in its totality, some ethical ideal. Justice, we are told, consists in every man doing his own job. But what is a man’s job? In a State which, like ancient Egypt or the kingdom of the Incas, remains u

I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.

Plato sees art as therapeutic: it is the duty of poets and painters (and, nowadays, novelists, television producers and designers) to help us lead good lives.

Plato feared the power of entertainment, the power of the senses to overthrow the mind, the power of emotion to obliterate reason. No admirer of popular democracy, Plato said that the enlightened or elite had a duty to educate those bewitched by the shadows on the cave wall, a position that led Socrates to quip: “As for the man who tried to free th

so I go about the world, obedient to the god,

This sign, which is a kind of voice, first began to come to me when I was a child; it always forbids but never commands me to do anything which I am going to do. This is what deters me from being a politician.

With feigned unwillingness, the Platonic Socrates proceeds to apply his communism to the family. Friends, he says, should have all things in common, including women and children.