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Plato: Soul
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Like all the Greeks, Plato took for granted that the highest good of man, subjectively considered, is happiness (eudaimonia). Objectively, the highest good of man is the absolutely highest good in general, Goodness itself, or God. The means by which this highest good is to be attained is the practice of virtue and the acquistion of wisdom. So far as the body hinders these pursuits it should be brought into subjection. Here... asceticism should be moderated in the interests of harmony and symmetry -- Plato never went the length of condemning matter and the human body in particular, as the source of all evil -- for wealth, health, art, and innocent pleasures are means of attaining happiness, though not indispensable, as virtue is. Virtue is order, harmony, the health of the soul; vice is disorder, discord, disease. The State is, for Plato, the highest embodiment of the Idea.
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Plato theory of the soul is the origin of his theory of the state. In it he claims that the only happy person is the just person, or the person who is ruled by Reason.
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From here through Book IV (445E), Plato describes the ideal state and its virtues. He begins with an anthropological vision of how people may have come together originally to find protection and to seek survival. As the state becomes larger and more complex, the need for order and defense becomes greater, and Plato asserts that this is provided by the "spirited" and "philosophic" natures of its leaders, the Guardians. The bulk of this section of the book is devoted to an extensive critique of education. Plato makes it clear that the human soul is always vulnerable when embodied. (Plato believes in the reincarnation of immortal souls.) To become well educated, the person must avoid being corrupted and must be exposed to a gradual and well tuned program of learning in gymnastic, music, poetry, arithmetic, and geometry.
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Beauty, Justice, and The Circle are all examples of what Plato called Forms or Ideas. Other philosophers have called them Universals. Many particular things can have the form of a circle, or of justice, or beauty. For Plato, these Forms are perfect Ideals, but they are ... more real than physical objects. He called them "the Really Real". The world of the Forms is rational and unchanging; the world of physical appearances is changeable and irrational, and only has reality to the extent that it succeeds in imitating the Forms. The mind or soul belongs to the Ideal world; the body and its passions are stuck in the muck of the physical world.
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Plato's ethics in the Republic is ... not based on high-minded moral principles with a transcendent summum bonum, but on down-to-earth considerations of efficiency. This is an important fact to keep in mind in an evaluation of his ethical system. Since the division of functions surreptitiously paves the way for the definition of justice as ‘doing your own thing’ in book IV (432d-433b), it is necessary to review, at least briefly, the kind of social order Plato has in mind and the means by which it is to be attained. For this explains not only the establishment of a three-class society and the corresponding parts of the soul, it also explains Plato's theory of education, and its metaphysical presuppositions. That economic needs are the basis of the political structure does, of course, not mean that they are the only human needs Plato recognizes. It indicates, however, that the emphasis here is on the unity and self-sufficiency of a well-structured city, not on the well-being of the individual (423c-e; 425c).
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Plato was prepared to say that the truly just person, whose soul is ordered, is beyond tragedy, and cannot be harmed. Such a person is leading a meangingful life, as against the immoral person. Moreover, Plato extended his theory of the Soul to encapsulate the perfect government, the Republic, led by “philosopher kings” who are just, governed by Reason. Contemporary theories of the psyche ... draw upon Plato’s three basic qualities of the soul, such as the Freudian designations of Ego, Superego and Id.
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