Throughout Book VIII, the author explains the insight of a tyrannical man. He says that lawless desires draw men towards all sorts of shameless and criminal things. While he says that we all have lawless desires while we are dreaming, the just people in the world never act on these desires. The tyrannical man however, allows these desires to cross over into his waking life. This man does not have the family or societal support system to pull him back from his shameful ways, so he falls further into sin. The man now has a strong love for all manners of lawlessness and banishes all sense of shame and moderation. He now lives for abundance, luxuries, and pleasures. He spends all his money with no regard for his obligations towards life and needs
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Other pleasures are not real pleasures because other desires can never be completely satisfied. All we do is quench those yearnings temporarily, easing the pain of wanting. The philosophical desire can be completely fulfilled by grasping the Form of the Good. He attempts to justify this by explaining that a king lives 729 times more pleasantly that a tyrant, because he is more just. It is best for everyone to be ruled by divine reason, and while ideally such reason would be within oneself, the second best scenario is to have reason imposed from outside. This is the aim of having laws. The purpose of laws is not to harm people, but to help them. Laws impose reason on those whose rational part is not strong enough to rule the …show more content…
He is sent to heaven and watches everything that happens on earth so that he can return and report on what he saw. He observes a system, which rewards virtue, especially wisdom. For 1000 years, people are either rewarded in heaven or punished in hell for the sins or good deeds of their life. They are then asked to choose their next life as either a human or an animal. Only those who were philosophical while alive catch on to the trick of how to choose just lives. Everyone else scrambles between happiness and misery with every
Other pleasures are not real pleasures because other desires can never be completely satisfied. All we do is quench those yearnings temporarily, easing the pain of wanting. The philosophical desire can be completely fulfilled by grasping the Form of the Good. He attempts to justify this by explaining that a king lives 729 times more pleasantly that a tyrant, because he is more just. It is best for everyone to be ruled by divine reason, and while ideally such reason would be within oneself, the second best scenario is to have reason imposed from outside. This is the aim of having laws. The purpose of laws is not to harm people, but to help them. Laws impose reason on those whose rational part is not strong enough to rule the …show more content…
He is sent to heaven and watches everything that happens on earth so that he can return and report on what he saw. He observes a system, which rewards virtue, especially wisdom. For 1000 years, people are either rewarded in heaven or punished in hell for the sins or good deeds of their life. They are then asked to choose their next life as either a human or an animal. Only those who were philosophical while alive catch on to the trick of how to choose just lives. Everyone else scrambles between happiness and misery with every