I personally agree with the fact that education as well as widen vision would create a fairer judgement of ‘the ideal life’. However, I would question whether the more educated idea would be more preferable than the less one. In my opinion, Socrates is making a conclusion base on his own intuition of the concept of pleasure, namely the intuition of the more educated and intelligible elites. Although the majority may agree with what Socrates argued, it does not necessarily mean that one should be prefer ‘the life in the crave’ under the condition that he has experienced both life in the crave and life out of the crave. After all, everyone should share the same fundamental right of freedom of choice. Thus, I think though Socrates’ argument is not sufficient enough to draw the conclusion that a more educated life is better than the less educated one.
In chapter six and chapter seven, Socrates tries to argue that ‘vision’ would affect people’s intelligence and people would have more pleasure ultimately when they become more intelligible (the process of education). He uses an analogy of ‘sunlight’ to show the role of truth and knowledge - as the tools for people to seek for ‘the good’; just as Socrates said “to hole these two to be light the good is right, but to believe that either of them is the good is not right.” Then he moves on to prove that to be more intelligible, or in other words to reach closer to ‘the good’, would give create more pleasure in the long term. He uses an extreme example of “men born in the prison” to show that though the process of accustoming the world outside the prison would be painful, but still the prisoner would be happier for his transfer from ‘the dark’ to ‘the brighter place’. After that, Socrates concluded, this process is exactly what education is, just as he said "education is not what the professions of certain men assert it to be. They presumably assert that they put into the soul knowledge that isn't in it, as though they were putting sight into blind eyes.” Therefore, education would be the best way to let people reach the highest happiness.
S then divides both “visible” and “intelligible” into two categories. Visible is divided into image and likeness, while intelligible into soul and arts. Image includes shadows, reflections produced by water, bright things etc., in general what the eye sees when the light is too strong or too dim (S did not mention the case when the light is perfect- not too strong nor too dim. It appears to be the “ideal” form, but according to its definition, i.e. “the ideals are intellected but not seen”, so this must be an imaginary case. As in many physics experiments, the perfect condition is always theoretical.) Likeness includes animals, anything that grows, and artefacts. These are things that change with passage of time, in other words, things that change according to an ideal. As argued by Tony, soul resembles induction and arts deduction. S argues that soul (induction) investigates images of past memories on the basis of a hypothesis, reaching a conclusion, which is also a hypothesis. On the other hand, arts (deduction) starts with a hypothesis derived from a specific case, which becomes the stepping-stone to reach a universal principle.
507b: Socrates starts by asserting the presence of many fair things and good things. Fair and good themselves are the “ideals”. “The many good and fair things are seen but not intellected, while the ideals are intellected but not seen.” S then introduces the concept of medium- the 3rd class that enables the thing to be seen and the eye to see, which is light in this case. Eyes can see when light shines, eyes can’t see when the light fades out. Similarly, soul “intellects, knows, possesses intelligence” when fixed upon truth; if fixed upon “that which is mixed with darkness”, then the soul ceases to possess intelligence. The sun creates light, and the “ideal of the good” creates truth. In other words, the ideal of good refers to something that creates the medium.
1.
light and sight are sunlike but they are not sun;knowledge and truth are similar with good,but they are not good.
2.
518 education :put knowledgeinto the soul vs a power that we own
Education means to turn around people’s sight, leading it
to the right direction.
But how do we determine if it is
the right direction? We can never assure that education always tell us the
truth. The education should play as a role of a window: it gives you the
opportunity to look through it and gives you the view of a whole new world, but
the freedom of choosing which direction to go always remains to you.
“Then our job as foundersis to compel the best natures to go to the
study which we were saying before is the greatest, to see the good and to go up
that ascent;”Human are primarily good , or at least they are born to have certain
“good”.
I see a contrast between civilization and nature of human.A Well-educated man might be civilized, but it does not mean that he is kindhearted.
In the chapter 6, Socrates first use the eye and sun to expresses that people need truth and then they have the intellection and goodness. Therefore, the goodness is higher than the truth. Then, Socrates separate the world into two part: one is visual world, and one is intelligible world. In the visual world, there are also two part: one is the intellected, and another one is its shadow. Thus, when people use the hypnosis to explore the truth, they do not use intellection but thought, which lead to the ’truth’ they get is not the real truth. But I have a little bit disagreement about that—we never know which one is the real things around us; so to judge which one is the true and whether we can get the truth, the standard is just from our common sense; so which one this the real truth is hardly to determine and people can not just refuse is directly. (see the following in the next one
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