Siohaberin- Blog #1 (Hannah)

Plato’s main goal of The Republic was to find justice, and for that he needed the perfect city. In order to do that, he had to sacrifice the free will of its citizens. Yet, the lack of individual freedom ruined the perfection of the Republic, because what is good for the public is not always good for the citizen. For instance, every person in the Republic was assigned a job at the craft he was most talented at; he could only do that job because that was best for the city. It did not matter if that job was not what he wanted to do, because to do any other job would not be in the public’s best interest, and thus unjust. Another way the founders took away the free will of their people was by only allowing a few of them to leave the cave. Plato and the founders made the citizens live in oppression and darkness for the betterment of the city. In this way, Plato himself chained the citizens to the cave. Their whole lives were sacrificed for the good of the Republic.
Each citizen was required to work for the city. “The doer must attend to what is done, not treat it as a hobby” (370b). He was required to work hard, and not leisurely, or the product and the city would suffer. He must only do this one job, so he could perfect it and the city would benefit the most out of his labor. Plato would “not let the shoemaker try to be a farmer of weaver or builder at the same time, but a shoemaker, in order that the work of shoemaking might be done well for us” (374b) Not do what was best for the city would be injustice.
Plato stated that justice was “Minding one’s own affairs on the part of the economic, auxiliary, and Gaurdian kinds, each doing what is its own in the city” (434c) The greatest wrongdoing would be for a citizen to try to do a job he was not good at.“ Meddling interference among these three kinds, and changing into one another, is the greatest harm to the city, and would most rightly be described as an extreme or wrongdoing” (434c) This is because it would not benefit the city for a natural farmer to try to be a soldier, or a soldier to try to be a leader. Plato took away each mans free will for the perfection of the public. Plato enslaved his citizens into servitude for the city, whether he realized it or not.
In Plato’s allegory of the Cave, Plato would only allow the best men to ascend up to the light and see the sun. Once he took them up there, he forced them to go back down and teach the rest of the citizens for the public good. “Then it is our own task as founders…[to make them] see the Good and rise upward in that ascent. And when they have ascended and sufficiently seen, not to allow to them what is not allowed’ ‘What is that?’ ‘To abide there, I replied, and refuse to go back down again among the prisoners and share their labors”(519d) Glaucon objected to this “Then we’ll do them an injustice? He said. We’ll cause them to live a worse life when they’re capable of better?’ ‘You again forget, my friend, I replied, that it is not a concern of law that some one class in a city should do and fare surpassingly well, but to contrive that this should come to be present in a the city as a whole…causing them to share with each other the benefit each is capable of providing to the community at large. Law produces such men in a city not in order to allow them to turn in any direction they each may wish, but in order that it may use them to bind the city together” (519e-520a) Plato did not allow the man who was freed from the shackles of the Cave to stay free. By doing this, Plato himself chained his citizens to the Cave. He only allowed the best citizens to see the light, and when those did, he forced them to go back down. The Cave is an allegory to The Republic itself, and Plato is himself the enslaver.
Plato said that a city ruled by a tyrant was enslaved, yet he enslaved his own citizens. He did not let them choose which jobs to have. He did not let them choose to live in a world of darkness or light. Their whole existence was to benefit the city. He sacrificed their lives for the public good.