Plato’s concept of freedom involves the attainment of a perfected form of society. His theoretical republic embodies this freedom in a way that most Americans would not see as a free society at all, but rather a strictly controlled community. Philosopher-kings were Plato’s conception of what a perfect ruler or rulers would be like. Freedom to Plato was not the idea of a person being able to go out and do anything they pleased, but of a person being exactingly shaped to embody ideals that are as close to the forms of beauty, justice, and good as a person or society could possibly could be.
Plato’s republic is an ideal society that he uses to unfold the secrets of the world upon the believer . He introduces the concept of the “forms” to us here by explaining that everything is a copy of a perfected form. Forms are the perfected versions of everything from geometrical shapes to ideals like freedom and goodness. For instance, beauty is real, but on earth, everything we would consider to embody beauty is merely a copy, from sunsets to flowers to grass. Another good example of one of Plato’s forms is the circle. It is obviously not possible to create a perfect circle but you can create a copy of one here on Earth. Plato also writes about how he believes that art is even further from the forms than nature is. The forms exist outside of nature, and nature is concerned with copying them.
Art, to Plato, is a copy of a copy. Artists try to capture nature’s beauty, which is actually just nature trying to reproduce the forms here on earth. In believing that art is essentially farther from the forms than nature, Plato argues that art pushes people away from their true selves and away from the forms. He argues as well that the arts negatively shape and influence citizens from birth and hinder the formation of a perfected republic.
Plato uses the “Allegory of the Cave” to give people an idea of what reality really is to the average citizen. He describes in detail about how most people do not ever venture far enough from their familiar realities to realize everything that truly exists in the universe. People find it painful to grow and move toward a different reality even if it is a more correct version or will get them closer to the forms .
In his “Allegory of the Cave” Plato proposes a very interesting idea. He argues that “If they [men in the cave] could lay hands on the man who was trying to set them free and lead them up, they would kill him.” This is an astonishing claim to make, but one that holds true even in our own very imperfect American society. Looking back through history, those men and women who lead humanity to a new level of awareness about reality have often been ostracized or even killed. For example, Martin Luther King or Ghandi, or Malcom X were all killed by the people they were hoping to reach with their messages that shocked the realities of so many. Plato’s theoretical republic is a state of existence that is closest to the forms and as perfect as humanly possible.
Plato used his experience with Socrates and Athenian democracy to further support his claim that justice and democracy, as it was seen by the common man of that era, was responsible for making his theoretical republic impossible to realize. To Plato, justice was an integral part of his theoretical republic as well as his conception of freedom. When Plato’s teacher Socrates was killed by the Athenians and their democratic methods, he turned to a different set of ideals to help him express what it meant to live in a perfect society. Plato was very dissatisfied with the decomposing democracy of his time for which he blamed the death of his teacher . Plato’s form of justice is the antidote to the oppression and inequality of his era.
Plato’s justice has to do with the righteousness of man and the way men act toward each other . To Plato, justice was a human virtue that made a man self-consistent and good . He believed that if men set aside their individual desires and need to indulge in every pleasure possible, and instead focused on the greater good and how they could act to benefit their own society, that justice would be alive and well in their society. In this way, Plato’s conception of freedom deals not with individual choice and the pursuit of individual desires, but instead with the pursuit of the well being of the republic’s citizens as a whole. Democracy was as caustic to justice as fire is to wood. To Plato, Athens was ablaze with injustice in their pursuit of democracy and individualized notions of happiness and goodness. America would be a great example of what Plato saw as unjust.
At the root of the forms Plato believed were necessary to realize in a perfect society, is the form of the good . The form of the good allows all other goods to exist. It could be considered the most general and the most important of the forms. The form of the good provided for Plato, the intellectual light for the others to grow and exist in. Plato’s form of the good is the ultimate principle of reality and truth and is the source of all order, harmony, beauty and intelligibility in the universe. Broken down, freedom, to Plato, would be the realization of this form of the good as well as the idea that individualism through democracy and the democratic process do not provide the community or city with the best option for self-governance.
Instead of an emperor or a president or any other kind of democracy lead by an authority figure, Plato has the ideal of philosopher-kings as rulers. These philosopher kings would be a sort of well-educated, deep thinking ruler who could understand the forms and the importance of them in governing their nations . According to Plato, this philosopher-king would have a “naturally well-proportioned and gracious mind, which will move spontaneously toward the true being of everything.” If these philosopher-kings were allowed to rule and implement his ideas and the forms, especially the form of the good, his republic would be realized and true freedom for all mankind would reign.
Plato’s conception of freedom is outlined in his Republic. It can be seen that his ideals and thoughts on politics are governed by the concept of the forms, with the form of the good at the top. The democracy as Athenians knew it and as Americans know it was not the best form of government according to Plato. He would have rather seen philosopher-kings ruling nation-states through the understanding of the forms like justice and beauty. His idea of freedom is very different than others of his era as well as the American ideal of freedom.
