Plato's Republic | Chapter One Review

Excellent reading of a very good translation of one of the greatest works of philosophy in the history of Western Ideas.
O, that modern philosophy still embodied its original meaning - to love wisdom! So much modern philosophy is garbage, if the standard is a pursuit of wisdom!
In the first chapter of Republic, Plato explores the subject of justice to discover its essential nature; he uses dialogue with a number of friends to obtain the knowledge he seeks, asking questions of his interlocutors to draw out their opinions, and using reason to expose their bad thinking.
By the end of the first chapter, Plato has not arrived at any definitive answers regarding the nature of justice. But he has gone a long way to eliminate what it is not, thanks to the bad definitions given by his companions.
Plato is one of the greatest philosophers in human history, but he was also one of the greatest writers -- we can easily overlook the fact that his work takes the form of a series of dialogues between a set of characters. Plato was writing dramatic narratives for a thinking audience; the drama arises from the clash of ideas as each character presents the case for the rightness of his opinions and Socrates exposes the wrongness of those opinions.
Plato is a complex thinker who eschews simplistic answers. Since the rationalistic scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, almost all philosophers have deliberately chosen to express truth in a strict binary that necessarily excludes one thought for another: not this, but that. Granted, Plato also rejects certain ideas as incompatible with the truth, but he rarely states things with the stark simplicity of the Thomists; rather, the dialogue format brings a richness to Plato's thinking that is entirely missing from philosophers such as Kant.
Since Plato, many writers of dramatic narrative have emulated his example with great profit -- authors who have explored philosophical issues, while not being philosophers themselves, include Shakespeare, Goethe, and Dostoevsky. In many ways, these men are the true heirs of Plato, while professional philosophers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze bear a striking resemblance to Thrasymachus (Plato's intellectual adversary in chapter one, and a toad of a man who encapsulates the unthinking, unserious, morally corrupt will to power).

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