In the process of reading Plato’s Republic on route to the journey of my fifth decade, I am half way or so through Book V, which also is quite moving. I have had three prior attempts at this reading endeavor, never reaching beyond the third book until this year.
One difference must be the circumstances of my life that, at this exact moment, make one thing right, not another. Of course this same rightness was not yet ripe beforehand, but rather green and hanging to make way for another that enticed and was tasty and fit. Well, besides all of that, I find myself reading this quite holistically.
What’s stated on any given page does not need to be correct or incorrect in any absolute aspect. In the end, there’s a lot here that has truth from which to learn. In some ways as the poet Walt Whitman encourages, I am drawing it through myself and finding what resonates.
In Book V, Plato posits that the “soul” of a person is better understood through what Robert Frost, the poet, calls their “avocation,” which if all things are right in the hurly-burly topsy-turvy, should also be their “vocation.” Thus, gender is not the key difference, argues Socrates. Of course there’s the obvious differences of gender, like child bearing; rain is not a river yet both comprised of water; so this is a delightful note on the logic of difference, and maybe a point of philosophy in that sense. So women and men should be assessed, educated, and treated according to their natures manifesting who they are. Considering Plato and Socrates lived around 400 BC and the social structure of Athens looked quite different than this, it’s an amazingly creative, forward-thinking view.
I used to consider Walt Whitman’s debut Leaves of Grass in 1855 was radical in its advocacy of equality of all beings. Well, this long-held view is in process of revision. As civil rights legend Martin Luther King famously said, judge by the content of character, that’s one way to read these pages of Book V.
I also am taken with just the project of Plato, Socrates, and their interlocutors here, the goodness of their endeavor.
We are made finer by what is finer. I bet that’s in a Socratic dialogue somewhere.
Cheers,
G. H. Mosson
Maryland, USA