Idealism In The Works Of Plato And John Locke

Register to read the introduction… What is to say that the government is not good? Do you define this on the amount of money they put towards a society? Is not everything under Plato put solely towards society, so if there was lacking, it would simply be lacking in resources which would be inevitable with or without the government. Would you judge a bad government by the lack of listening to the people's concerns? Why would the government listen to the people's concerns when the people are not on the same intellectual level as the Philosopher Kings, therefore it would be like asking a child for advice in an adult world; their opinions, although important, are mostly irrelevant in criticism. One may argue that people are not educated because they were not granted that right, so the people are not listened to, from a reason that is not by their choice. If one does not have the potential to be chosen for education, then why would you waste the resources on them? You are fighting to say that they have a right, but when knowing that they do not have the capacity to think on the same wavelength as another citizen. Blocking out the bronze souls is like filtering out the bad minds, and leaving room only for the divine minds to give their opinion. If you were to educate everyone, and everyone was to put the same amount of effort and time into their research, and among testing, the results showed vast differences in I.Q, would you still invite all of those people to a meeting to discuss future matters? I would not think so, you would want the top scholars, whereas the others, although given the same opportunity just were not born with the same qualities needed to be specially educated. Philosopher Kings, with their high intelligence, can sense who has the capacity to learn to the fullest extent and who does not. So you are skipping the process of having to educate everyone, …show more content…
False ideas are the result of putting simple observations together in the wrong order. Plato speaks about his theory and of the cave, stating that one only knows that what they have seen, therefore not knowing any different from their surroundings, one could not possibly comprehend life unknown to them. Therefore one cannot gain full knowledge unless surrounded by it, again supporting the theory that the Philosopher Kings should be the ruling class. Philosopher Kings are consistently, since birth revolved around education, compared to others who gain knowledge from ‘their observations'. What if one were to be in an isolated community? Without being surrounded by knowledge, how in fact could you be able to comprehend life you were not familiar with? How could one be expected to rule in the best interest of all when you would lack the broad knowledge necessary to look out for not just some, but an entire regime. Plato states that everything we can see and hear is not what is most real. What is most real is what we can grasp by means of intellect. Referring back to Locke and his idea that people simply gain false ideas through putting observations together in their minds in the wrong order is saying that in fact all ideas in one mind are considerably true, but just unorganized. To gain observation from the real world does not mean that the knowledge gained is superior. What if one were to witness a community governed completely in falsity, such as where the media covers up real dilemmas with twisted stories on heroism concerning that given country, would the observer be gaining knowledge? Or would they be gaining false misconceptions? Would the observations therefore be void, and whichever order you would be putting them into your head, it would not matter because they were irrelevant to the