Plato’s Ideal City and Theory of Recollection
Plato’s Ideal City
In Plato’s Republic, the ideal society is divided into classes based on function. Farmers and artisans produce goods. Guardians defend the state and maintain order. Rulers enact laws and establish justice. This undemocratic, class-based society is described in detail, especially regarding the education of future leaders. Leaders receive a strict curriculum:
- Gymnastics and Music: Educate the soul, fostering courage and philosophical thinking. Music includes rhythms, harmonies, and Homer’s myths, although Plato is critical of traditional religious views of the gods.
- Mathematics and Astronomy: An initiation to the knowledge of Ideas, up to age thirty.
- Dialectic: Knowledge of the Ideas and the Idea of Good, for five years. After this, fifteen years of government service prepare them to govern at fifty.
Philosopher-rulers, men and women alike, live communally without private possessions or families. They share meals and partners, focusing on the common good. Social class distinctions are maintained, and the city’s size is controlled. Their main function is the proper education of all citizens, ensuring courage, moderation, and obedience to the common good. Plato hoped that without private interests, philosopher-rulers would dedicate their lives to the common good, unlike leaders in most states. The most qualified among the ruling elite would be chosen as the philosopher-king. As stated in the Republic, there is no justice in states until philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers.
Plato’s Theory of Recollection (Anamnesis)
According to Plato, to know is remembering (anamnesis). The soul knew the Ideas in a previous existence separate from the body. Since things “mimic” the Ideas, sensitive knowledge serves as an occasion for remembrance. In the dialogue Meno, the possibility of knowledge as a souvenir is raised. Socrates’s response involves:
- A deduction of the doctrine of reminiscence from the mythical belief in preexistence and transmigration of the soul.
- A demonstration of reminiscence through a maieutic experience (recognizing one’s ignorance and discovering knowledge within oneself) with a slave.
Socrates guides the slave to discover the solution to a geometrical problem—a particular case of the theorem of Pythagoras: constructing a square twice the area of a given square. The solution involves using the diagonal of the original square. This demonstrates that knowledge resided in the slave’s soul prior to birth. Reminiscence and the immortality of the soul are linked. In Plato’s Phaedrus, the myth of the winged soul explains that the soul loses its wings when it falls to Earth but regains them through contemplating beautiful things, moving towards the Ideas. The doctrine of reminiscence is related to Descartes’s theory of innate ideas and is criticized by empiricist philosophers like Aristotle and Hume.