platos three waves Essays - Dialogues Of Plato, Socratic Dialogues

According to the above plan, the Republic is made up of three somehow embedded blocks : From the most superficial viewpoint, the Republic is made up of three parts : a main body, the dialogue proper, preceded by an introduction and followed by a conclusion of almost exactly the same size. The introduction presents five challenges to Socrates' notion of justice, each by a different character, the first three in dialogue form, and the last two mostly in the form of monologues. The conclusion may be viewed as a set of answers to these five challenges, based on what has been said in the dialogue proper, even though they are not directly addressed each to the individual who presented the answered challenge, and are not given in the order the challenges were presented, for reasons that are explained elsewhere. The main body of the dialogue may further be split in two, based on explicit indications given by the author : it begins and ends with a three part "history" of the genesis and corruption of the city, viewed as a mirror image "in large letters" of man's soul, whose justice the discussion is all about. The first part is totally dedicated to the "rebuilding" "in speech" of the city, presented as a gathering of men attempting to live in society, and leads to an organization in three classes : workers, guardians and rulers. The second part moves from the justice in the city to that in man's soul, whose structure is depicted in between, in what may thus be viewed as the center of this whole "history". And the third part explains how the city and man together degenerate over time from the best form of government down to the worst forms of tyranny : in this later parts, man and city are "woven" together to show that they interact in such a way as to make it impossible to say which one exp lains the troubles in the other. But between the second and third part of this "history", another discussion takes place, which is explicitly depicted by the author as sort of a foreign body within the surrounding discussion by the use of the image of three succeeding "waves" engulfing it. At the beginning and at the end of this "digression", as well as at each new "wave" that is brought forth, Socrates wants us to believe that we get once again sidetracked, or at least that we are tackling a topic that might not be fit for the "many". Yet again, this discussion in the discussion is structured in three parts, three "waves", each bigger that the previous one (in terms of "volume" measured by the approximate number of pages, the second is about twice as long as the first, and the third four times as long as the second). And the third part, the longest, can itself be further split in three parts in a movement that is the exact opposite of that of the "history" of the city : whereas the "history" starts with the "buil ding" of the city, deciphers in it the structure of man's soul to get to the principles of justice, and from there falls back towards the corrupted city and man, the discussion in the third "wave" starts with the corrupt city which doesn't understand the need for true philosophers, and the men who only pretend to be philosophers, to move toward the "forms" which should enlighten men's lives, chief among them the good beyond being, and build from there the program of education of the true philosopher-kings, that is, the recipe for "building" those men who might "rebuild" the well behaved city. At all levels of this plan can be found a three-step pattern consonant with the threefold structure of the soul introduced in the middle of the middle section of the "middle" discussion : a desiring, passionate, part (which is actually manifold), the epithumiai, which is the "reflection" in us of nature, phusis, matter, biology and the like ; a reasoning part, the logos, which makes it possible for us to get in touch with the intelligible, with order, with the "forms" outside time and space, with the divine ; and