Summary Of Socrates 'Perfect City'

We see Socrates putting forward his idea of “The Perfect City” in Book II. They discuss how different people have different tasks and jobs that they will perform. They say that no man should be doing anything else but his own job. They further establish that they would need the perfect soldiers, who will be called Guardians.

Book III deals with their discussion on educating these Guardians. It seems like they want the Guardians to be the perfect men. They hold an elaborate discussion about how to go about doing this. They discuss musical education, then they move on to diets and then to physical training.

There are some pretty smart ideas that are raised by the discussion. I, personally, disagree with the whole idea of such elaborate attempts of manufacturing the Guardians. As stated in my earlier papers, what makes humans humans, is their inherent virtue of non-conformity. Humans never like the idea that they have to conform to a particular set of rules. In Book III, the three men are doing nothing but making that set of rules which are bound to be violated by one or more of their perfect soldiers because they are humans after all.
The most significant idea put forward by Socrates that rubs against me is their idea of what the ideal diet of the Guardians should be.
We see him using Homer’s heroes as an example when he says in 404b-c, “You could learn that even from Homer. For you know that when his heroes are at war, he does not portray then banqueting on fish – even though they are by the sea in the Hellespont – or boiled meat but roasted meat only, which is the sort most easily available to soldiers. For it is pretty much always easier to use an open fire than to carry pots and pans around
everywhere.”

This is surprisingly stupid because someone like Socrates, who, thinks about everything to a great extent, would know that all the heroes who were at war had a home to come back. A home where they would relish all the delicacies that Socrates thinks should be left out of the Guardians’ diet. The food just symbolizes the fact that the soldiers have a place to go home to. This is the main driving force behind a soldier’s perseverance and courage.

This is stupid and, one could even say – inhumane. One should never deny anyone any sort of food that one wants or would want to try. Denying the soldiers such basic pleasures can have unpredictable consequences.

As I stated earlier, there are some brilliant ideas which have also been presented in the discussion. One of them is the idea of observing the soldiers from a very young age to know their conviction to the cause. Socrates says in 413c, “Well then, as I was just saying, we must discover which of them are best at safeguarding within themselves the conviction that they must always do what they believe to be the best for the city. We must watch them right from childhood, and set them tasks in which a person would be most likely to forget such a conviction or be deceived out of it. And, we must select the ones who remember and are difficult to deceive, and reject the others.”

We see this being done even today. The weed out courses in the first semester at colleges are a great example of such a practice. Students who think that they are cut out for a particular course, find out that they, actually, are not. Just like that, Socrates thinks that they should examine each potential guardian very closely so that there are no weak links.

I would never want to be a guardian in this city. In the attempt to keep out all the possible evils, Socrates ends up denying the Guardians a lot of things that they deserve just because of the fact that they are humans too. As stated in my earlier paper, I would say that one might as well start artificially intelligent robots.

Socrates objects to display of emotions like sadness and happiness. There has also been intensive discussion about not fearing death. Socrates says in 387b, “We will beg Homer and the rest of the poets not to be angry if we delete these and all similar passages – not because they are not poetic and pleasing to the masses when they hear them, but because the more poetic they are, the more they should be kept away from the ears of children and men are to be free and to fear slavery more than death.”

Although it is justified to fear slavery more than death in some cases, but is many cases, the driving force behind a soldier’s strength and courage IS the fear of death. It is the fear of death that enables a soldier to lift unreasonably heavy weights and kill so many people. If there are certain things that the soldier fears more than death, then it can affect his wartime decisions.

The main reason I wouldn’t want to be a Guardian is because of the dietary restrictions. I would state again that one should never mess with a person’s food. Food has a stronger psychological effect than what Socrates thinks it does. Socrates also denies sexual pleasures to the soldiers by denying the Guardians to have a Corinthian girlfriend.

All these reasons, coupled with the fact that one has to learn literature and poetry makes me nauseous, just thinking about the idea of being a Guardian in Socrates’ Republic.