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 Plato

Abstract: This text will tell us some important things of Plato. At first, we will know the background of Plato’s family, society. Secondly, we will know an important historic figure ——Socrates, who influences Plato very much. Plato told us the nature of love and privilege of power, and his thoughts were described clearly in his work The Republic. Combine those, we will find a real Plato by ours eyes.
Key words: Birth family Socrates Love Philosopher / Kings The Republic Power

1. Birth and family
Plato is born in a prominent aristocratic Athenian family. His father and mother’s names are Aristo and Peritione respectively. His uncle Critias is a famous politician in Athens at that time. As the fourth children, his real name is Aristokle and “Plato” is just a nickname. There have many views about his nickname. Someone said that he gets this nickname for his strong body; someone said that he gets it for his big forehead; someone said that he gets for his sweet eloquence. They said that Plato’s mouth had been stood by a bee for a while and he got bless from God. I don’t know which is true, but I think he must be sting by a bee.
2. Socrates and Plato
“Sometimes people come into your life and you know right away that they were sent there by God. They serve some sort of purpose, to teach you a lesson or help figure out who you are. When you see them, you know that very moment that they will affect your life in some profound way.” I like the words of Charles Dickens which is the best sentence to describe the relation between Socrates and Plato.
Actually, Socrates gave more influence to Plato than we could think. As we all known, Plato grew up during the twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sprata. The war ended with the surrender of Athens and overthrow of the world’s first democracy. When Plato thought his world would be peaceful, his tutor Socrates was sentenced to death for making a deeply trail of Youngman, From then on, thought as a nobility, Plato hate the democracy more and more. This feeling influences all of his life and brings out his philosophy idea. For his tutor’s death, he had never believed the political system of government and went abroad for twelve years. During this time, he came to many countries, just like Italy, Egypt and Cicely. He traveled with his classmates and wrote the famous Dialogues. We can say that without Dialogues we could not know the beginning of philosophy so clearly, without Plato we could not know Socrates so famous. This feeling between tutor and student is respected by us forever.
3. The nature of Love
In dialogues, Plato exhibited greater interest in elements of human nature that are strictly subordinate to the rational soul in Phaedo and The Republic. Sharing the same general theory of human nature, Phaedrus treats love as a (divine) madness, a natural, if not wholly desirable, emotional imbalance. But the diverse speeches delivered in Plato's Sumposion (Symposium) offer several more favorable accounts of human emotion in general and of love in particular. The Ion grants some value to the role of art as a copy or imitation of sensible things, which are themselves merely copies of the immutable forms.
4. Philosopher / Kings
Plato believed that an ideal state, embodying the highest and best capabilities of human social life, can really be achieved, if the right people are put in charge. Since the key to the success of the whole is the wisdom of the rulers who make decisions for the entire city, Plato held that the perfect society will occur only when kings become philosophers or philosophers are made kings. (Republic 473d)
Thus, despite prevalent public skepticism about philosophers, it is to them that an ideal society must turn for the wisdom to conduct its affairs properly. But philosophers are made, not born. So we need to examine the program of education by means of which Plato supposed that the future philosopher-kings can acquire the knowledge necessary for their function as decision-makers for the society as a whole.
5. The Republic
The most comprehensive statement of Plato's mature philosophical views appears in Politeia (The Republic), an extended treatment of the most fundamental principles for the conduct of human life. Using the character "Socrates" as a fictional spokesman, Plato considers the nature and value of justice and the other virtues as they appear both in the structure of society as a whole and in the personality of an individual human being. This naturally leads to discussions of human nature, the achievement of knowledge, the distinction between appearance and reality, the components of an effective education, and the foundations of morality.
Because it covers so many issues, The Republic can be read in several different ways: as a treatise on political theory and practice, as a pedagogical handbook, or as a defence of ethical conduct, for example. Although we'll take notice of each of these features along the way, our primary focus in what follows will be on the basic metaphysical and epistemological issues, foundational questions about who we are, what is real, and about how we know it. Read in this fashion, the dialogue as a whole invites us to share in Plato's vision of our place within the ultimate structure of reality.
6. The Privilege of Power
At this point in the dialogue, Plato introduces Thrasymachus the sophist, another fictionalized portrait of an historical personality. After impatiently dismissing what has gone before, Thrasymachus recommends that we regard justice as the advantage of the stronger; those in positions of power simply use their might to decree what shall be right. This, too, expresses a fairly common (if somewhat pessimistic) view of the facts about social organization.
But of course Socrates has other ideas. For one thing, if the ruling party mistakenly legislates to its own disadvantage, justice will require the rest of us to perform the (apparently) contradictory feat of both doing what they decree and also doing what is best for them. More significantly, Socrates argues that the best ruler must always be someone who knows how to rule, someone who understands ruling as a craft. But since crafts of any sort invariably aim to produce some external goal, good practitioners of each craft always act for the sake of that goal, never in their own interest alone. Thus, good rulers, like good shepherds, must try to do what is best for those who have been entrusted to them, rather than seeking their own welfare. (Republic 342e)
Beaten down by the force of Socratic questioning, Thrasymachus lashes out bitterly and then shifts the focus of the debate completely. If Socrates does happen to be right about the nature of justice, he declares, then it follows that a life devoted to injustice is be more to one's advantage than a life devoted to justice. Surely anyone would prefer to profit by committing an act of injustice against another than to suffer as the victim of an act of injustice committed by someone else. ("Do unto others before they do unto you.") Thus, according to Thrasymachus, injustice is better than justice.
Some preliminary answers come immediately to mind: the personal rewards to be gained from performing a job well are commonly distinct from its intrinsic aims; just people are rightly regarded as superior to unjust people in intelligence and character; every society believes that justice (as conceived in that society) is morally obligatory; and justice is the proper virtue areth of the human soul. But if Socrates himself might have been satisfied with responses of this sort, Plato the philosophical writer was not. There must be an answer that derives more fundamentally from the nature of reality.
7. Conclusion
Time is a versatile performer. It files, marches on, heat all wound, runs out and will tell. The life of Plato just likes a wonderful play. In that play, we can see the all achievement of him; we can learn the best part of his thoughts. We can find that he is a real master of philosophy who is worthy of respecting, we can find that he also is a common man who ended with dying and inevitably contained irritation, disappointment, and loss. When we face the world, we will feel helpless and lose more or less, so did Plato.

Reference:
1. Tang Ming, Master of Philosophy, Press: China Machine, 2007.
2. Nickolas Pappas, Philosophy Guidebook to Plato and the Republic, 1999.
3. Claudia Baracchi, Of Myth, Life, and War in Plato's Republic, 2001.
4. Daryl H. Rice, Guide to Plato's Republic, 1997.
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato

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