Short Essay #2

Antony Tran

March 15, 2016

Short Essay 2

Justice and injustice are concepts that are always hard to define. One cannot see if they are doing a justice or an injustice if they are ignorant to what being just is. They may be committing just acts without knowing why they are just, only that there are good consequences. Therefore, the possibility of committing seemingly just actions while being unjust without being aware of it is very likely. That ignorance is shown through the telling of “The Allegory of the Cave”. The people at the bottom of the cave are there because they lack the self-knowledge to escape. However, the people that are making the shadows are doing an injustice to the people at the bottom of the cave. Those people casting the shadows were able to come out of the cave and came back to the middle. They became politicians to teach people about what they want in the world to keep them chained. To be able to see that the politicians are doing an injustice, one needs to know the difference between justice and injustice. There also needs to be a clear understanding what true education means and how it translates to “The Allegory of the Cave”.

In “The Allegory of the Cave” there are people at the bottom being chained in a way that makes them unable to move, so they are focused on a fixed location. There are people in the middle of the cave that cast shadows to deceive the people at the bottom of the cave into believing there is nothing else out there. Few of the people at the bottom that are dragged out of the cave become the very people casting the shadows. These people that cast the shadows remain there and do not want “to go down again among those prisoners or share their labors and honors, whether they be slighter or more serious” (519d). The politicians would not help the people at the bottom of the cave and continue to mislead them. There would not be justice in education, because of their actions.

Justice in a city is defined as “the minding of one’s own business and not being a busy body”(433ab). In this way, the people at the bottom of the cave are doing justice by “learning”. They are each minding their own business and are not trying to hinder their education. The politicians, however, are trying to control the minds of the prisoners at the bottom of the cave. They are directly influencing what is going into the minds of the prisoners so that they can control what they see and how they look. Each person is born to a pre-determined type for his or her job and is not to deviate from what they do, as to not hinder the city as a whole. With the politicians controlling what the people at the bottom of the cave are seeing, they can control what each person thinks they are pre-determined to do. These politicians are not minding their business or trying to create the best city, they are trying to do what is best for them while not combining the three parts of justice. Justice can be further separated into three parts: the calculating, the spirited, and the desiring.

The calculating is responsible for making balanced decisions and looking out for the soul as a whole, the spirited is courageous like a warrior in battle, and the desiring makes no rational decisions for what it wants and needs to be controlled by the calculating. However, the politicians that are holding up the objects to create shadows are letting the desiring part control them into tricking the people. Glaucon asks, “are we to do them an injustice, and make them live a worse life when a better is possible for them?” Socrates replies by saying, “it’s not the concern of law that any one class in the city fare exceptionally well, but it contrives to bring this about in the city as a whole, harmonizing the citizens by persuasion and compulsion” (519e-520a). Socrates is trying to explain why those that are casting the shadows are not trying to pull the ones at the bottom out. However, this shows that the people in the middle are contempt with not trying to pull them out. These politicians are keeping them in the dark so that they remain chained for the betterment of themselves.

The calculating part is being overtaken by the desiring part because it is almost as if these politicians are tyrannical. In a tyranny, they are not concerned with the whole of the city, but with themselves. To insure this, a tyrannical leader would use imitation in order to keep their people ignorant. To Socrates, “imitation is surely far from the truth; and, as it seems, it is due to this that it produces everything-because it lays hold of a certain small part of each thing, and that part is itself only a phantom” (598b). The images shown are just illusions of the truth and can be misshaped to fit the politicians’ perspective. The politicians are keeping the people at the bottom of the cave by not letting them now the real truth. The shadows are a form of deceit and are not realized until the people are pulled out of the bottom of the cave. In this way, the politicians are doing a great injustice to the people at the bottom of the cave.

Injustice is “meddling among the classes, of which there are three, and exchange with one another is the greatest harm for the city and would most correctly be called extreme evil-doing “ (434c). Although there is no exchange between classes, the politicians are taking over the jobs of the teachers and are teaching people lies about themselves. Because of this the politicians are able to keep those people that are being taught at the bottom of the cave. In this instance, the politicians are letting their desiring part rule and are greedy for their spot as a politician. By keeping their citizens at the bottom of the cave, no one will be able to challenge them and they can keep doing what they want. The politicians are not experts in any field other than being a politician and yet they try to mislead the people at the bottom of the cave what is real. The fact that they politicians are misleading the people, it prevents education to the people as a whole. This is an even greater injustice because part of justice is the ability to provide an education to all.

In an ideal city, they women and men must have the opportunity for an equal education; depending on which pre-determined role they were born into. Socrates says, “here is no practice of a city’s governors which belongs to woman because she’s woman, or to man because he’s man; but the natures are scattered alike among both animals” (455d). Each person is born and given a job, not based on their gender but based on their pre-determined nature. However, with the politicians teaching, everyone else is left in the dark and not able to learn what their role would be. This gives the politicians power to tell them a false predetermination, it causes the city to not be able to do the best it can. The shadows on the wall cause these false predeterminations, but it is the same for everyone. This makes it so that everyone receives the same education, but a poor education. The shadows are made to deceive the people at the bottom of cave so that they do not consider the possibility that they are being lied to. The politicians are no longer fueled by justice, but injustice, and are hindering the education for the people at the bottom of the cave.

The politicians at the middle of the cave are doing an injustice to their citizens at the bottom of the cave. The politicians have lied to the citizens by being made to believe that the shadows are the true forms rather than an imitation. The politicians use these images to keep the citizens stuck at the bottom of the cave and make it harder for them to obtain the self-knowledge that they are stuck in the first place. Preventing them from escaping and from a proper education is an injustice. The politicians may have started off just, but over time they were taken over by their greed and turned into tyrants. They no longer cared about the good of the people and kept their citizens from knowing the truth of the true forms of the world. They are hindering the growth of the education, which will make the people unjust as a whole. “The Allegory of the Cave” shows what will happen to a city when the politicians are corrupt and are unable to lead their citizens to the correct path. The city becomes unjust and the citizens are unaware of what is happening to them and assume they know what they need to know about the world. Both sides become ignorant of what they do not know and will eventually be unable to turn back from injustice.