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>> Two in San Jose and 59 degrees in downtown San Francisco.
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[ Music ]
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>> Right, ladies and gentlemen, Michael Savage, Hot Talk 560 KSFO. We're talking
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about what kind of world do you want to live in? What highway are we on? Do we
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want to be on this highway? Do we want to create a new highway? What did Plato
-
say? This guy knew what was going on, but that was Greece. This is San
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Francisco.
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>> Is that the idea area? To keep talking until, finally, we get it right? We're
-
having the same conversations Plato and his friends had back in 400 BC.
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[ Multiple Speakers ]
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>> Did you see the paper the other day about that high school student who was
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caught cheating on her college boards.
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>> Yeah, I read that, yeah.
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>> Oh, yeah.
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>> She said her teacher gave her the answers and told her that everyone cheats.
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That's the way the world works.
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>> But I think it's sad. People are under a lot of pressure.
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>> Let's face it here. If you were guaranteed that no one would find out,
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wouldn't you cheat?
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>> Would you cheat? Would you? What if there was a world where nobody cheated,
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and philosophers were the kings?
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[ Music ]
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This is a book that pulls you in, plays with your mind, and dares you to put it
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down without saying what you think.
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>> Plato's Republic has the kind of power to intrigue and infuriate that few
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works can equal. You can argue about anything from whether we should allow
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certain kinds of music to be sold, whether we should censor the arts.
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>> What is justice?
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>> What is a great society? What ought to be?
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>> What is authentic, and what is fake?
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>> How one has knowledge.
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>> What do we teach the young?
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>> Whatever it is, it's somewhere in Plato.
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>> Plato's Republic follows the intellectual adventures of Socrates, who one
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night, 24 centuries ago, created an ideal city, the Republic, were all of
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mankind's problems are solved.
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>> This book, the Plato's Republic, changed my life.
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>> William Bennett, former Secretary of Education of the United States says it
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encouraged him to go into politics.
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>> Plato says, yeah, we better have censorship in the ideal republic, because
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you're going to have otherwise you're going to have license. Everyone's going to
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do what they see on the video tape, and the videotape didn't even exist. He said
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he would kick out the poets, too. Go up to North Beach, I tend to agree with
-
him.
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>> Mike Savage, a radio talk show host, who bills himself as the compassionate
-
conservative, reads it regularly to his listeners.
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>> It's sort of an internal chess game that I play with myself, and I will read
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a few pages and find my mind, for, let's say, the pieces of thoughts that dance
-
around in my head sometimes that get out of control fall in place. It's a way of
-
ordering my mind, my imagination, and all of my mental faculties.
-
>> Nobel prize-winning poet, Joseph Brodsky dismisses it.
-
>> There are people, and people, you see, and this is what Plato couldn't
-
understand. He thought that all people should be like, well, let's say himself.
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>> Novelist Joyce Carol-Oates questions his sanity.
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>> The Platonic vision is basically somewhat unreal. It's basically mad.
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>> Madman? Visionary? Plato has been hailed as the father of philosophy, the
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first feminist, a dangerously na�ve idealist, and a fascist. The fact is, we
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know very little about him or what he meant by his greatest book.
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>> It was, indeed, a kind of thought experiment to show the impossibility
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precisely of a perfectly just, perfectly communal, perfectly rational society.
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What the limits are, the limits that are rooted in our human nature.
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>> I think it's the deepest challenge against our way of life that there has
-
ever been, and a deep challenge, because it has a kind of great nobility and
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beauty to it.
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>> Plato was born in a place that worshiped beauty and knowledge, Athens, 428
-
years before the birth of Christ. The newly completed Parthenon towered over the
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city, another crowning achievement to the world's first democracy. This was the
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golden age, where the first plays were performed and the first histories of the
-
world were written, a time when the Athenians produced art and ideas that we
-
still marvel at.
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[ Music ]
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But it was also a time of devastating human loss. For the first 23 years of
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Plato's life, the Peloponnesian war raged between Athens and its neighbor,
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Sparta. Plato watched as the Athenian democracy was overthrown by a aristocrats,
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then replaced by dictators before democracy sees control once again. The one
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constant through it all, in Plato's view, seemed to be corruption, brutality,
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and blind ambition. Still, he probably would've ended up in politics like the
-
rest of his wealthy family if he hadn't met a sidewalk philosopher named
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Socrates.
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>> Socrates seemed to have stood out in absolutely every possible way. He said
-
that he was to Athens what a gadfly is to a large, lazy horse, in that the gods
-
had sent him there to prick Athens and to irritate it and to make it think
-
seriously about the kind of life that its citizens were leading. He was there to
-
make people uncomfortable.
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>> Ever says this scum set up shop here, he's made me work twice as hard.
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>> So you say Simmias here is your enemy, because he makes you work harder than
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you did before?
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>> Well, isn't that enough to make any man your enemy?
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>> But an enemy is a man who does you evil, isn't he?
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>> Any fool knows that.
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>> And a friend is one who does you good.
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>> Any fool knows that, too.
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>> But what a fool does not know is what is good and what is evil. Now you make
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better vases and you work harder because of Simmias's competition, do you not?
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>> To talk to Socrates was to be taken down the garden path at the end of which
-
one finds that, alas, you don't know what you're talking about. So it's fun to
-
read the works. You sympathize with the person Socrates is questioning, and you
-
have a sense that this poor person is being had, but you don't know exactly how
-
it's being done. Socrates is the master of this. He can give you enough rope to
-
hang yourself, and he always does.
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>> The master wrote nothing himself. We know him through writers like the
-
general, Xenophon, and the comic poet, Aristophanes, who lampooned Socrates as
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the proprietor of a thinking shop.
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>> Anger.
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>> I told you once, Simmias, and I won't tell you again.
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>> Anger always interests me.
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>> Protagoras.
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>> But the infamous Socratic method was captured most vividly by Plato in a
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series of imaginary conversations known as The Dialogs. He made his mentor the
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main character of more than 20 books, including The Republic. The action begins
-
at the port of Piraeus, just outside Athens. Socrates bumps into an old friend
-
who invites him home to a party. It's there that he seizes the occasion to start
-
a conversation that will last all night.
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>>Cephalus, it's clear that you're a good and decent man, so if anybody knows
-
what it means to be a good and just person, it's you.
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>> I have been able to proceed through life with a clear conscience. I haven't
-
been tempted to cheat or deceive someone to survive. I pay my bills.
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Occasionally, I give to a good cause.
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>> So if I understand you, Cephalus, to be a good person means to tell the truth
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and to pay your debts.
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>> Well, Socrates --
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>> The main argument of the Republic is an argument about being a good person,
-
but the term that's usually used in translations is justice and what's at stake
-
is the definition of justice.
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>> The style of the book's like the Johnny Carson show. Here we are, we're
-
gathered together. We're talking. Let's meet so-and-so. Let's see what he has to
-
say. Let's meet Cephalus. Well, Cephalus, come on out and tell us what you think
-
about things. Well, Polemarchus, come on out. What do you think? Well, here's
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that crazy guy, Thrasymachus. Come on out, Thrasymachus. What do you think it
-
is? Well, it's like an ongoing, you know, late-night TV show with these
-
"experts" coming on. Here's your interviewer, your moderator, who says, well,
-
that won't do. No, that idea of justice won't do and this idea, and the audience
-
gets caught up in it.
-
>> A man has lent you a weapon and now wants to have it back, but in the
-
meanwhile, he believes his wife's having an affair with someone else, and he's
-
desperate and actually wants to kill himself. Would it be right to give him what
-
is rightfully his?
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>> No, I suppose not.
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>> So in this case, doing the right thing would, in fact, be doing the wrong
-
thing. It's perfectly obvious that everyone is just doing what is in their best
-
interests. The reality is that justice in this day and age is in what's in the
-
interest of the stronger party. As a matter fact, I'll take it even further. The
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advantage goes to the unjust person every single time.
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>> Let's see if I understand you.
-
>> At this point in the story, Socrates smashes the theory that might makes
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right, but back in Athens, might smashed right. The leaders of the shaky
-
democracy had only had only recently lost the Peloponnesian war. They were tired
-
of being stunned by Socrates's sharp tongue. In 399 BC, the 69-year-old
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philosopher was brought to trial for undermining the system.
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>> The official charge was that he did not believe in the gods of the city, and
-
that he corrupted the young. He showed you how to find holes in what other
-
people believed but didn't necessarily, in fact never, substituted something
-
positive in its place, and that was seen as a very dangerous thing, which in
-
fact, it was. After all, Plato, his greatest disciple, was also the greatest
-
critic Athens has ever had.
-
>> Socrates's trial was attended by health of Athens, including Plato. He says
-
Socrates was offered his freedom if he would just stop questioning people, but
-
he refused, proclaiming that the unexamined life was not worth living. Found
-
guilty by a jury of 500, he suggested he be sentenced to free meals at city hall
-
for the rest of his life. They didn't laugh. He was condemned to die by drinking
-
a poison made from the hemlock plant.
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[ Music ]
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Plato's account of the death of Socrates made him a symbol of free speech and
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the favorite subject for artists like Jacques-Louis David.
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>> His friends come to say goodbye to him, and he spends the whole day trying to
-
convince them that the soul is immortal, and then after he dies, the soul, which
-
is the most valuable part of the human being, is going to remain perfectly
-
unharmed. Socrates takes the poison and starts drinking it and continues
-
discussing the issues. The executioner says "Please don't do that, because if
-
you get agitated and talk too much, the poison doesn't work so quickly."
-
Socrates says, "No leave me alone," he says. "Leave us alone, my good man. Your
-
job is to give the poison as many times as it takes to kill me. My job is to
-
have a discussion for as long as I can." He insisted on talking until the very,
-
very end. Plato closes the dialogue by describing him as the best, the wisest,
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and the most just man of all we knew at that time.
-
>> The martyrdom of Socrates made a political career unthinkable Plato. He spent
-
the rest of his life carrying on his teacher's work. Nobody knows for sure where
-
Socrates's ideas leave off and Plato's begin. Over time, the two names have
-
become interchangeable. It is as Socrates that Plato plans a new world, where
-
wisdom, not power rules, and it is Socrates who explains why philosophers must
-
be its catalyst. Until philosophers are kings or the kings and princes of this
-
world have the spirit and the power of philosophy and political greatness and
-
wisdom meet in one, our cities will never have rest from their evils. No, nor
-
the human race. Back at the party, Socrates has turned into the dinner guest
-
from hell. The rest of the company has been drawn into the debate.
-
>> You want me to prove that virtue is its own worth.
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>> But you have to prove that the good and honest person who goes unrewarded and
-
unrecognized comes out ahead in the end.
-
>> You're on.
-
[ Chuckling ]
-
We'll begin with a very simple society with men and women leading very basic
-
lives, living close --
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>> And so Socrates begins to fantasize the first utopia in Western literature.
-
Perhaps they can find that good person with the best life here, he reasons. For
-
after all, society is just the soul writ large.
-
>> He originally creates the city as a device, in order to understand something
-
about human beings. He wants to say that each of us is made up of three parts.
-
There's a rational part. There's an emotional part that loves honor and gets
-
angry and so on, and then there's what he calls the appetitive part, which is
-
the part that wants food and drink and sex and so on, the bodily appetites.
-
>> Those animal appetites must be kept in their cages. Reason and honor will
-
rule the republic, just like the well-ordered soul. Everybody gets one job for
-
life, and a color-coded class, bronze for workers, merchants, and artisans.
-
Silver for police and soldiers. And pure gold, naturally, for the philosopher
-
King.
-
>> See, he said that there's three types of people, the gold person, the silver
-
person, etc. Now you may say, oh, my God. That means some people are not as good
-
as others. Well, let me ask you something --
-
>> Who's to determine what class they get into?
-
>> It's real simple. I could never be a linebacker. I said that yesterday on the
-
49ers, but don't let me sit and listen to somebody tell me every 49er is capable
-
of being a poet or philosopher.
-
>> Right.
-
>> We're not equal.
-
>> In Plato's Republic, the philosopher kings would much prefer to be off
-
thinking, but duty requires them to rule the state. Eternal bonding is
-
forbidden. It might detract from loyalty to the state. Mothers care for babies,
-
but they aren't told which ones are their own. A child's place is determined not
-
by sex or race, but purely by intelligence. A farmer's daughter might become a
-
philosopher queen.
-
>> He does imagine that there will be some women all the way up to the top
-
class. "If then, we use the women for the same ends as the men, we must teach
-
them the same things. Yes, the males received an education consisted of
-
literature and athletics, yes. Then we should give these two sorts of training
-
to the women, too, and military training also, and we should treat them in the
-
same way."
-
>> Repos in Plato's time probably greeted this with astonishment. Athenian women
-
had no vote and virtually no education. Often, the weren't even the sexual
-
partners of choice. Wives didn't eat at the same table as their husbands, let
-
alone fight beside them at war.
-
>> It's a world in which men and women are completely equalized on the premise
-
that women must never again be mothers. So I think what Plato means to say is
-
this is what it would take to really overcome sexual differentiation and
-
hierarchy.
-
>> Was the Republic meant as a straightforward blueprint or a political satire,
-
as many scholars insist. Maybe some of both.
-
>> There is the sense that in his city, I would not be able to do what I liked.
-
There is a sense in which I would not be able to have my own family in my city.
-
Those are very, very frightening ideas. On the other hand, on the other hand,
-
there's this incredible love of learning, of understanding, of trying to fit all
-
the various pieces of our lives and of the world together in such a way that
-
they can't even for one moment, make sense to us. It's such a powerful idea that
-
there are moments when you say, even if the price is the other, it might be
-
worth paying.
-
>> Plato doesn't want the rulers fighting over money or personal relationships.
-
So he doesn't give them any. The rest are allowed the comforts of their own
-
homes and families but have no say in how things are run. Those who have can't
-
rule. Those who rule can't have. It's an interesting idea. To keep up the
-
quality of the flock, the philosopher kings secretly rig periodic meeting
-
lotteries to produce the best possible offspring. Once the children are born,
-
the society begins shaping their characters early and carefully.
-
[ Music ]
-
"Shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales, which may be
-
devised by casual persons? And to receive into their minds ideas, for the most
-
part, the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they're
-
grown up? We cannot."
-
>> William Bennett's collection of stories, The Book of Virtues, starts with
-
that quote from The Republic.
-
>> There's really only one fundamental political question, and that is the
-
education of the young. It's a very platonic thought. I mean, I think anyone
-
would agree. What do we tell them about ethics? What do we tell them about jobs,
-
life, career, destiny, fate? Isn't that what determines the future of this
-
country, education? And that is, essentially, what he saying in this book. That
-
the whole course of a city state and the whole course of a life depends upon
-
education.
-
[ Multiple Speakers ]
-
>> To ensure that the Republic remains on course, the children are only allowed
-
to hear heroic and uplifting tales. Homer's stories about the gods temper
-
tantrums and carousing with humans are out. So is rowdy music.
-
>> This is Zeus.
-
>> Socrates decrees that any poet who refuses to produce politically correct
-
fairytales will be banished from the kingdom.
-
>> "The first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction
-
and let the sensors receive any tale of fiction which is good and reject the
-
bad. And we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized
-
ones only." Well, this is just a very spirit of the dictator.
-
>> Censoring storytelling in ancient Athens would be like censoring TV in our
-
own culture. The tragic plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus were the free press of
-
their day. And Homer, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, was a read as a guide
-
to life and revered as a god. Plato thought that was unhealthy. As he puts it in
-
The Republic, "Good role models don't make good theater." He doubted whether
-
average citizens could separate reality from fantasy and worried that they might
-
imitate the world they saw on the stage.
-
>> And he said if amusements become lawless and the youths themselves become
-
lawless, they could never grow up into well conducted and virtuous citizens.
-
>> Who is to give the guidance that's most authoritative in life? Is it to be
-
the philosopher, which includes the scientists, the man of reason? Or is it to
-
be the poet, the person or man of inspiration of the gods, of revelation, of
-
mystery? And Socrates insistence is the poets need, finally, to bow to reason.
-
That would be one of the great costs of a perfectly just society. If you're
-
going to say everyone must be brothers and sisters, don't expect Shakespeare or
-
Goethe or Aristophanes to be part of it.
-
>> "From my window at dusk, I would watch the horde of bleating automobiles, as
-
they flash back and forth past shapely, nude columns and Dordic hairdos,
-
standing pale and un-rebellious on the steps of the city court."
-
>> For the late Russian poet, Joseph Brodsky, this is no theoretical discussion.
-
He lived in Plato's Republic Soviet style. Jailed four times, he was finally
-
exiled as a social parasite.
-
>> There is a certain point that it was allowed in the city, well, and a certain
-
point which it wasn't. As simple as that. The state was simply doing the
-
discerning job, which is, essentially, a very Platonic idea in the sense,
-
because what it does, it simply subordinates ascetics to the ethics. This is
-
exactly what Plato is all about, and this is garbage. Well, aesthetic is, how
-
should I put it to you? Aesthetics is the mother of ethics, not the other way
-
around. No matter how ethical society can build, it won't secure the
-
masterpiece. Good ethics don't.
-
[ Music ]
-
>> Plato thought reason should rule in his republic. We think he pushed it a
-
little too far. We reject the eugenics. We reject the imposition of order. We
-
would reject the censorship. No, there's too much totalitarianism here. There's
-
too much utopian totalitarianism. There's too much tyranny. There's too much the
-
smart guys know best.
-
>> When he gets to the point of saying you shouldn't love your children. We
-
should structure the city in such a way that we don't even know who our own
-
children are, so that we won't have these intense personal attachments, you
-
can't run a city that way, because if people don't love their own, that they're
-
not going to care about anything else either. The vision of The Republic is a
-
vision of justice and harmony. Well, people are not going to be harmonious,
-
because people are going to insist upon, in the face of all these laws,
-
committing adultery. They're going to have romantic liaisons. Children are not
-
going to want to be taken from their mothers. Mothers are going to love their
-
children. Somebody's going to want to create music. Everybody is born with the
-
specific spiritual identity, and we're not worker ants. I'm not sure that ants
-
are happy. I really wouldn't want to be an ant to find out.
-
>> I don't think any serious person could agree that The Republic is really a
-
good place to live in, and I doubt very much whether Socrates or Plato did. The
-
Republic is meant by Plato to prove that philosophers can never be kings, and
-
that we can never have a completely communistic society. It establishes the
-
limits of politics, I think, more clearly and more profoundly than any thinker
-
ever has, precisely by pressing those limits of this fantastic thought
-
experiment.
-
>> My own view is that he believed it. He believed every word of it, and he
-
never had a doubt that if his city was installed, it would be the best city in
-
the world.
-
>> No, that's why we go to wise men and experts, isn't it? To clear things like
-
this up.
-
[ Music ]
-
Is this a real mountain? Plato didn't think so. What about those clouds? This
-
flower? That bee? He said they're just copies. That there's a parallel world
-
where you'll find the ideal cloud, the original flower, the perfect bee. The
-
soul is imprinted with these models at conception. That's how we recognize a
-
tree, for instance, when we see one. For Plato, the idea of a tree that you hold
-
in your mind is what's real. This particular tree, and all the others we see,
-
are just imitations of that idea.
-
>> Plato's theory of forms is an effort to explain what's true in an absolute
-
sense. What is it possible to know really? Answer, what doesn't change. When you
-
will learn geometry, you're not learning about chalk circles. You're not
-
learning about circles that are even more perfect than the one I've drawn, if,
-
in fact, the circle is made of something physical. You're learning about an
-
ideal circle. One that you can't touch. One that you can't even see, because any
-
circle you could see would be a physical circle. And so, Plato, wanting to point
-
us to what can't change and is perfect, wants us to consider a circle that can't
-
be seen.
-
[ Music ]
-
>> What do we see about the three yellow and the two green? What do we see?
-
>> Mathematicians proving the existence of invisible circles and abstract
-
equations all deal with ideal forms, but the kind of mental leap Plato was
-
talking about went way beyond math, and that's frustrated philosophers for
-
centuries. On file in that metaphysical heaven, were perfect examples of
-
everything in the universe, even qualities like beauty, justice, and goodness.
-
Today, wise men and women say he was looking in the wrong direction. For them,
-
our world, this minute, is as real as it gets.
-
>> These ideas were always be evolving, so long as we are human, and so long as
-
consciousness is evolving. You simply can't stop history. You see, everything is
-
changing. Reality is flux.
-
>> Whatever you think of Plato's quest for permanent answers, nobody denies the
-
power of The Republic's most famous story, the allegory of the cave.
-
[ Music ]
-
Imagine that this is the only world you've ever known. For as long as you can
-
remember, you've been chained here in this cave watching the shadows dance on
-
the wall in front of you.
-
[ Music ]
-
Unable to even turn around, you have no idea that they are merely reflections
-
cast by the outside world. You believe they are all there is to life. This is
-
your reality.
-
[ Music ]
-
Then one day our prisoner breaks loose.
-
[ Music ]
-
Drawn to the light, he is almost blinded by his first sight of the sun. But
-
little by little, he is able to open his eyes and see the world beyond the cave.
-
>> We are prisoners right now. We are now in the middle of a cave, [inaudible]
-
of a dark room in which we are all tied up. This is the cave. The freest moments
-
that we have for Plato are moments of imprisonment, are moments of slavery. We
-
all begin, in some sense, is prisoners of our culture or our religion or our
-
civilization. We're given answers to the most fundamental questions. What is
-
love? What's a good family? Who is God? Nowadays, the currently fashionable
-
conventional philosophy that's taught in our schools is something called
-
pragmatism. The idea being that we just simply can't really transcend our own
-
time and culture. That we just have to deal with the world that's given to us.
-
Now Plato would say that means just rearranging the shadows on the walls of our
-
cave.
-
>> One of the tasks of The Republic is to bring people out of the cave, so
-
they're not looking at shadows, but looking at the real thing out into the sun.
-
If there's a cave today and shadows the people are looking at, it is the sort of
-
darkened living room at four in the afternoon, with those images flickering
-
across the screen, miseducating the young.
-
[ Music ]
-
>> Are his fellow prisoners thrilled to learn that the real world is out there?
-
Not exactly. Plato ends the story by saying that they would tear the enlightened
-
one limb from limb if they could break their chains. He has challenged
-
everything they believe in. Of course, once you've seen the light, it's hard to
-
go back. As Socrates discovered, it's a lonely being the bearer of new ideas.
-
[ Music ]
-
The most damning criticism of The Republic came in the 1940s.
-
>> Seig!
-
>> Heil!
-
>> Seig!
-
>> Heil! Heil.
-
>> Philosopher Karl Popper the charge that Plato had opened the door for this
-
madness with the eugenically superior model state he had envisioned in 386 BC.
-
>> People do think of Plato as a fascist, as maybe the first fascist, maybe is
-
the greatest fascist. I think it's extraordinarily unfair and inaccurate to
-
think of him in those terms. He does not believe in any kind of racial
-
superiority of the people in his city. He does not believe that this society can
-
come about by, as it were, forcible means.
-
[ Explosions ]
-
>> The idea that Plato foreshadowed certain ideas that we've come to associate
-
with fascism, I'd say, I think that's fairly tenable. If Plato had never lived,
-
however, we would still have had Hitler. One certainly can't blame Plato for
-
Hitler or Stalin or Marx or Lenin. It's not for their theories that they're
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remembered but for their actions. They were brutal murderers.
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>> Corruption is the human norm, and this is what Plato won't swallow.
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>> Plato's understanding of human nature might appear to be as abstract as his
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ideas, but some of those ideas are still very much alive. For instance, in
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Singapore, in just 30 years, this small, ethnically diverse island has been
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transformed into one nation, one people, one Singapore.
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[ Singing ]
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Led by a benevolent despot named Lee Kwan Yew, whose reputation for integrity is
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as legendary as his strict controls, the crime rate is down. The standard of
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living is up. It's seen as one of the most astonishing success stories in the
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developing world and is a nation in a straitjacket.
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>> He has curtailed individual freedoms and put into place a highly moralistic
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and constraining conception, which includes a lot of policies for breeding. I
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mean, eugenic policies, which say that we'll give special breaks to people in
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certain classes when they reproduce but will penalize reproduction and some of
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the other ethnic groups. All of this, with a kind of Platonic idea that in this
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way, we're going to promote the common good and raise people's well-being.
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>> It's Hot Talk 560 KSFO.
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>> I got a quote from another political scientist, Ben Franklin. He said,
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"People who are willing to sacrifice freedom in exchange for security will
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receive neither and deserve neither."
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>> Yes, I love that. That's very beautiful. So you're saying --
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>> How do we make America an orderly state without making it overly orderly and
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turn it into a Singapore where a piece of chewing gum on the street is an
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offense for $500, for example? I don't want to live in in this Huxleyan Brave
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New World, okay? So I think maybe, Plato's Republic can also warn us away from
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an overly ordered state, an overly clean place, an overly good place.
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>> Time to take out the trash and clean out the barn.
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>>Ah, that brings us to a democracy. Could a philosopher king survive in
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Washington DC?
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>> On the one hand, it's wonderful that anyone can grow up to be president. On
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the other hand, it's frightening that anyone can grow up to be president.
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>> America doesn't choose its leaders by lot, as ancient Athens did. It holds
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popularity contests instead. Plato might well have admired the idea of a small
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group of wise men and women seeking justice in the courts, but he'd most likely
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see America's obsession with individual power, money, and success as signs of a
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society with a seriously disordered soul.
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>> One of the serious criticisms Plato addresses to democracy is that its love
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of freedom easily becomes a life of license without realizing it. That a taste
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for having no restrictions can easily replace the more thoughtful and mature
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conception of freedom, which is freedom has to be freedom under the rule of law.
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[ Crowd Shouting ]
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>> I mean, can we admit that our public life is disordered in something like the
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way Plato says, and yet still defend our own way of life? What can the role of
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reason be in a democracy like ours without taking away the freedoms that we all
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cherish?
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[ Music ]
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>> The citizens of the Republic are satisfied with their place in life, because
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they've been told that the gods created them for different purposes. That's why
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they made some people with gold in their veins, some with silver, and some with
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bronze. In the book, Socrates calls the story The Noble Lie.
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[ Snare Drum Playing ]
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>> We, too, have our myths, our noble lies. The Declaration of Independence,
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prior to a probing philosophical analysis, which very people undertake, it
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really comes to us and is taught to us when we're Young is a kind of myth, a
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kind of poetry, a kind of beautiful belief, and what the philosopher in our
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society, if he was a Socratic, would have to do is question it, doubt it. Ask
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what do we mean by human rights? Do they exist?
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[ Music ]
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>> The Republic was Plato's ultimate attempt to vindicate Socrates way of life.
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In the allegory of the cave he says that the escaped prisoner cannot sit alone
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forever under the sky of ideas. It is the philosopher's job to return to the
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cave and try gradually to turn others away from the shadows.
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>> The deep insight into human beings here is that we are political creatures.
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That the life of the city and our lives are inextricably intertwined. That
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probably explains why I'm engaged personally, so much engaged in public life and
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politics. I am persuaded by Plato that the man who lives away from the affairs
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of the city state is the idiot. That to separate oneself from the life of the
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community is to separate out oneself from life itself.
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[ Music ]
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>> Plato wasn't just someone who lectured and wrote. He was someone who started
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a school. His school was called The Academy. The word we have now, academy, and
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likewise, the word academics, comes from the Greek word, and at his school, he
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had a student who went on to become rather famous it is all right. His name was
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Aristotle.
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>> Aristotle arrived at The Academy when he was 17. He spent the next 20 years
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arguing with Plato about the meaning of it all before he went on to tutor
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Alexander the Great. The world's first university lasted for almost 1000 years.
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Then in 529 AD, the Christians targeted this early think tank as a pagan
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stronghold and shut it down forever.
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[ Non-English Spoken ]
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Today, there's not much left of Plato's Academy, but it is still hallowed ground
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for those lovers of wisdom who gather each week to listen to the ideas of modern
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philosophers. When the school was closed, the Academy's students fled, probably
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taking Plato's and Aristotle's manuscripts with them for safekeeping.
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>> It meant that they were scattered all around the Mediterranean world,
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extremely good copies of all of Plato's works, and this meant that the odds that
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they would last of The Dark Ages and be rediscovered in cellars and in wine
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casks, in all kinds of crazy places was much greater than, for example, poor
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Sophocles or poor Euripides, most of whose plays were lost, and so on.
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>> Socrates survived the dark ages, thanks to Islamic scholars. They translated
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Plato into Arabic and passed his books through Egypt, India, Persia, in Spain.
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It wasn't until centuries later that the ancient texts were finally unearthed in
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Europe and translated into Latin and other languages. This ninth century
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manuscript found in Constantinople was purchased by King Henry IV of France
-
towards the end of the 16th century. It is believed to be the oldest surviving
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copy of The Republic in the world. In the 24 centuries since it was written,
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Plato's Republic has sired hundreds of imaginary worlds. In 1516, Sir Thomas
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More named the mythical kingdom he modeled on Plato Utopia. In Greek, it means
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both no place and good place. Sigmund Freud studied Plato. The inventor of
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psychiatry divided the human psyche into the into the id, the ego, and the super
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ego, an intriguing resemblance to Plato's balance of reason, honor, and passion
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in the well-ordered human soul.
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>> That idea that the person is the soul or the mind, and that the body is
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somehow external and temporary, a bit like a house in which you might live, has
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been a very prominent idea in the history of Western civilization. Of course, it
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has obvious connections with the immortality of the soul in Christianity.
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>> The German philosopher Nietzsche called Christianity "Plato for the people."
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Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley called Plato one of his gods. Even Arthur Conan Doyle,
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creator of Sherlock Holmes, pays tribute when Dr. Watson quotes Plato to
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describe his detective friend as, "The best and wisest man I have ever known.".
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>> Allow me to congratulate you on a brilliant bit of deduction.
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[ Music ]
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>> Plato never gave up searching for the truth, and one must never let it be
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said that his views were impervious to experience. His one venture into politics
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was on the island of Sicily, where he had hoped to turn the young ruler into a
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flesh-and-blood philosopher king. His pupil, however, soon grew bored with the
-
experiment and tried to sell Plato into slavery. After barely escaping with his
-
life, Plato felt compelled to create a somewhat more user-friendly utopia. The
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poets still are banished, but the philosopher kings have been replaced by the
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vote and a set of laws. Plato died shortly after finishing The Laws at the age
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of 80. His biographer reported he had passed to that city state which he planned
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for himself and planted in the sky. Many centuries later, philosopher Alfred
-
Whitehead concluded that everything is just a footnote to Plato.
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[ Music ]
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>> "He imagines that he is a master in dishonesty, able to take every crooked
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turn wriggle into and out of every hole, bending like a withy and getting out of
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the way of justice, and all for what? In order to gain small points not worth
-
mentioning." He's talking about the life-long litigant, ladies and gentlemen.
-
Twenty-seven-hundred years ago the lawyers of the judges were already driving
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Greek society and saying, okay.
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>> I think one of the most compelling moments in the history of Western thought
-
is in this book, and I will never forget it. I still get goosebumps thinking
-
about it, which is the challenge of the Ring of Gyges. If you had this ring, and
-
that's the story and here, and you turned the bezel of the ring, and you became
-
invisible, and you could get away with anything by being invisible, would you do
-
it?
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>> What Plato wants to prove in The Republic is that that's wrong. That in fact,
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even with a ring that made you invisible, even apart from what other people
-
think, it's good to be good. The question is whether he succeeds in proving what
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others might want him to prove or expect him to prove. The course of The
-
Republic, he redefines goodness. Plato tells us that virtue is internal to a
-
person. That is the harmony of the soul.
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>> People leave the dialogue differently from when they start. You are a changed
-
person, in some ways, by encountering this man who truly means what he says.
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This is not just highfalutin bull session. This is about life and how you leave
-
it, how you live it, how you leave it, and the conditions under which it should
-
be lived. This is about the real stuff.
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>> You see, most of us, when we think, usually we're in trouble, and we think to
-
get out of trouble. What Plato tries to convey there is thinking can be a feast
-
and a frenzy, and that philosophy is that thinking as a feast.
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>> "The wonder," Plato says, "is the beginning of philosophy." We still wonder
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about the same questions he set down all those centuries ago, searching for
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wisdom and justice and finding an imperfect approximation, struggling between
-
reality and illusion, reason and passion, politics and philosophy, public and
-
private, body and soul. And probably, we always will be.
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[ Music ]
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>> Behind every great book, there's a great story in it. Now sit back and spend
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an hour with the best reading experience you'll ever have on television. The
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Great Books Festival continues on TLC, adventures for your mind.