Plato's Cave

Well, to defend Plato from what I see as your misunderstanding (and I can be mistaken), I interpreted those politicks in The Republic to be that 1) “philosophers” are created naturally through environmental circumstances without any “institutional” training that you can speak of, 2) philosophers are not chosen by themselves to lead – rather they are chosen by the masses out of necessity, and 3) philosophers don’t innately desire to lead! Personally, I can say, I do not enjoy responsibility of any kind (recognizing the fact that I am young). I live a very simple life and I like to keep it that way. I take care of myself; I live meager. That’s basically all I want from life. Why would I want power when it implies responsibility? If it is thrust upon me by necessity then sure I would necessarily take it, but other than that, I wouldn’t want it. The Republic is formed when society is desperate…

And by the looks of it, we’re going to need some more fuel for the bonfire that’s already burning.

I was speaking generally, but I don’t know where you got the notion of training philosophers. That seems a little odd to me…

How do you train somebody to be passionate???

it would work for the philosophers

knowledge before you are born… theory of the forms… and no, he didn’t just make that up, he argues extensively for them…

-Imp

This is what happens when philosophers attempt to draw artistically…

That’s a pretty good rendition of Plato’s vision.
It could really be applied to any society and how it functions; just replace Plato’s forms with the dominant and enforced ideas of a society at the hierarchy. Instead of the philosopher kings running society you have the media, journalists, and advertising. Today’s ‘philosopher kings’ (media, journalists, advertisers) want you to consume, spend your days in boring, dead-end jobs, and engage in a ‘morning prayer’ (reading newspapers).

Republics were more like city states. The republics were not nations with several cities in it. Republics in Platos time were only city size communities.
The allegory of the cave
speaks of of how shadows and images are confused as real becuase the mind is subjagated by leader and their ideas.
I Think.

Isn’t philosophy a “dispassionate” search for the truth?

The battle for truth is eternal. those who have it have a responsibility against the people (children really) who don’t. I believe I understand what plato was getting to about his philosopher kings (but I’m not sure he realized it), it is that truth exists without us, and that it’s not about “dictatorship”, democracy, or any idealogy, it’s about the people who have the most insight and vision into the truth about what it is (the system, people, etc) what they are looking at.

The people themselves (those without truth) falsely interpret those with truth as ‘dictators’, ‘evil people’, ‘anti-freedom’, etc, etc because they are in the world of illusions, they can’t see very well at all. That is the whole point I think about plato’s philosopher kings is that mankind as a whole can’t reason or control their animal impulses (animal impulses being forms of illusions in and of themselves).

(paraphrased from another post of mine)
When children don’t understand because they are not mature enough, should parents just neglect them?

Thats the kind of mode I get in when the world gets me down, I am the parent and other people are the children.

I think of it like this: If I could see if a group of people who are a part of the human family were about to fall off a cliff and they didn’t see it, I could inform them of this fact, but they might not believe me, they might think I’m adictator for telling them what to do. They might think that I am an evil person because the cliff is hard to see in the dark.

It’s painful to know the truth when others are unable or unwilling to see the flaws in their own thinking and past their own animal impulses (prejudice). The real problem is that most human’s are formed poorly, and I think anyone who is a philosophe in the truest sense accepts that all human beings are flawed, but this doesn’t mean truth cannot be recognized and illusions of self, animal impulses curtailed because one knows the truth, one can decide accurately and perceive correctly.

Being farsighted in what is true is like having extra good eyesight in the dark (our own ignorance, and human ignorance as a whole), but it is also a great gift. I’ve learned in my life that ability is all well and good, but without character, humility and the right combination of values, it’s not all that great by itself.

Re: Do you think it would work? This government run by philosophers?

In the United States of America we actually have a ‘government run by philosophers’.
The ‘government’ that ‘runs’ America is The Supreme Court of The United States… They are the interpreters and expounders of the philosophical principles and laws governing our society. It is The Supreme Court that determines if particular conduct and laws assist in or repress our ‘philosophy of freedom and individual liberties’ as outlined in our Constitution.
Law is ‘codified philosophy’. The Supreme Court evaluates our methods (laws) and then, in publishing an ‘opinion’, expounds upon the precedents and philosophical underpinnings of their ‘reasoning’ for their decision(s); their ‘word’ then becomes the ‘law of the land’.

The ‘philosophers’ of The Supreme Court are the real government in the ‘long-term’ development of The American Democracy.

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In a way this is already being done. I mean for the most part we only see, hear and know what we and told and or shown. The government, news channels, ect only share what they believe we need to know and not all that we should know. We discussed this in my PHI 130 class and decided that even if the government was run by philosophers we the people would still only know so much. We are made to believe only what we are told or what we are shown and not to question these things.

Plato’s cave is full of freaks

demanding refunds for the things they’ve seen

-Jack Johnson

Isn’t Plato’s Cave really a vaginal opus?

After almost one thousand years Plato’s Academy was closed by Justinian.
It was closed for being against christianity and it’s philosophy.
Government is better from for and of the people.

Would philosophical leaders be more inclined to promote the growth of the individual compared to current politics which seems to stump growth…

Excessive of the indivdual and the excessive of collective lead to tyranny, look at the quote at the bottom of my post, that was plato who said that.

Quote doesn’t work for me out of context. When I say individual growth it means the philosophical insight of the individual, the more philosophically minded the less inclined to excess…

When early church fathers wanted classical, popular substantiation for their concepts of otherworldy absolutes and this world resolutions, they turned to Plato.

Yes but the philosophical mind knows there is no such thing as an individual - there is only one all connected reality. Therefore individualism is the illusion. When you think of the mechanics of how we breath, what we depend on, the fact that we are an interlocking piece in nature (i.e. collective unity), means the individual is the one in plato’s cave.

I disagree.

No one else has got your eyes, can see the things you see.