The Good Society And The Transformation Of Desire Summary

Plato’s Republic: The Good Society and the Deformation of desire This paper will outline and elaborate upon the important elements of Martha Nussbaum’s article titled Plato’s Republic: The Good Society and the Deformation of Desire. It will focus on three important elements in the article starting with relevance of Plato’s ideas today, deformation of desires and the importance of institutions in combating the latter. The ideas set out in Plato’s The Republic are still relevant in today’s democratic world, even though not embraced fully; components of its ideas are relevant to our society. Contrary to The Republic being too totalitarian as perceived by many, he is indeed democracies’ best friend. Plato emphasises the total opposite of democratic ideals, challenging it to justify itself and in the process contributing to the improvement of democracy. He challenges the very notion of democracy and exposes its limits and weaknesses. Plato’s idea of an elaborate system of controls ensures society from drowning in too much democracy and ideals of freedom. However, to strictly adhere to his ideas would give the opposite effect of extreme totalitarianism. His idea of limiting some desires ensures that certain aspects of practising democratic freedom does
not infringe on the rights of others. This holds true in issues such as racism, sexism, terrorism, child pornography etc. Furthermore, his emphasis on equal education of both men and women are still prevalent today. The second important element mentioned in the article stresses on the fact that democracy is used as a license to indulges in desires inconsistent with justice thus, amounting to deformation of desire in a democracy through the excessive usage of freedom.
This he believed is due to too much freedom making us become prisoners of our desires which deforms just human desires. A classic example is given by Martha Nussbaum, that of Indian women polled desiring shorter years of schooling. However, under Plato’s ideas, their desire cannot be used to formulate public policy as such would not be just in the overall scheme of things, but merely false preference on their part influenced by social norms and
circumstances. Plato in his works pointed out that deformation of desire is the accumulation of many factors both internal and external with the latter Influencing the former. Internal factors being personal convictions with external factors being influence of the society. As such, Plato insisted on the society to be guided by institutions whose purpose was to ensure a good society to limit such from happening. The good part can be adopted while omitting the more radical ones. He went too far in being too totalitarian but out of his ideas we find a basis upon which to properly align institutions to combat deformation of desires such as the idea of education censorship which is important to today’s ongoing discussions of TV violence, pornography and also his idea of ensuring equal education for both male and female populace. His ideas emphasised that to ensure a just society, we have to construct and manage our society so that it is not deformed in any way.