Topics Philosophers

Question Throughout Plato's Republic, he makes alot of claims, that all stem from the question "what is justice", from there the soul to the analogy of the state, to the forms etc, my question is, does Plato actually believe in these analogies or are the just that, analogical statements to help his arguments

Accepted:
March 29, 2013

Comments

As I understand the Republic, the overarching aim of the work is to explain the nature of justice, specifically justice as a quality of individual human beings: in order to elucidate the nature of justice in the individual, Socrates introduces an analogy between justice in the state and justice in the soul. While I believe that Plato not only thinks that there is indeed a close enough similarity between the state and the individual human soul for the analogy between them to be genuinely illuminating, and, moreover, that there must be some relationship between justice in the state and justice in the individual soul if the use of the word 'justice' in both cases is not to be equivocal, I think that the question of whether there is indeed a relevant enough similarity between the state and the soul for the analogy to be fruitful, and, hence, the question of whether it might not be correct to think that justice in an individual is different from justice in the state--neither of which is engaged at any great length by Plato--merit further consideration. So although the argument of the Republic certainly seems to presuppose the aptness of the analogy between the city and the soul, whether their relation is really close enough to support the argumentative weight that the analogy is supposed to bear deserves further attention if one wishes to evaluate the soundness of the argument of the Republic.