Plato's Republic - Part 2

Is there a just political regime that is not susceptible to corruption?

As Alfred Whitehead aptly noted, one of the refreshing, and thus inviting, features of Plato’s dialogues is the lack of excessive systemization that characterizes later philosophical projects which, due to their particular epochs, often force modern philosophers to trudge through knee-deep turgid language in winding, narrow corridors of thought, offering few possible detours and a certain predetermined end.

Plato, on the other hand, plays with ideas, often in a light-hearted, or ironic manner. Although, no doubt, he has a particular project in mind for each of the dialogues, he uses his characters to give the reader leave to contemplate component ideas—harmonic reverberations of his fundamental philosophic sine wave, if you will. Or to use the previous simpler metaphor, there are a significant number of side-tunnels ready for exploration scattered throughout Plato’s corridors of thought.

One ready example of this is when Polemarchus asserts “that justice is doing good to friends and harm to enemies.”

Plato’s protagonist, Socrates, has been extracting from his interlocutors ideas about the meaning of justice. Through the voice of Polemarchus, he then raises the question of how to define important terms like friend, enemy, good, and evil. Thus, Plato opens the door to further philosophical inquiries into broader perennial human questions.

Said another way, Plato’s greatest contribution to philosophy seems to rest not, necessarily, in the answers his dialogues provide, but in the quality and range of the questions they ask. Plato raises the perennial human questions, those questions that strike at the human condition in all people groups, in all regions of the world, and at all times in history.

There is no topic that is off-limits for Plato. This is why it can be said Plato’s dialogues are an inexhaustible mine of suggestion. And that being said, they are nearly as complex as they are inexhaustible.

Perhaps the best approach to such a complex and inexhaustible mine of ideas would be to approach The Republic in a similar manner as C.S. Lewis advised readers to approach epic poetry. In A Preface to Paradise Lost, Lewis writes,