Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Response for 9-14-11
Plato drastically changes his mind on what the guardians are to be taught. Instead of only listening to music and reading literature that evokes only honorable and powerful actions, he says that the young guardians are to be exposed to an entirely different lifestyle. At a young age, they should be sent into the country to learn the pastoral laws and to gain experience in hard physical labor. When that training is done, they will then be brought back to the city and take over philosophical and military training. This is because Plato believes that in order to justly rule a city, the rulers must be familiar with and understand all the different aspects of that city and be able to recognize the good in all of it. A ruler must be able to harmonize all of the different aspects to make a ruling that will fit will each of them, which is essentially what music does. Music harmonizes several types of rhythms, notes, tempos, and etc. to be able to make one song, and this is what the rulers of Plato's Utopian city must be able to do.
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This is more in addition/something I missed that I would have liked to include in my own response. As Kelsey says, Plato argues that there ought to be a strict regimen as to how the perfect guardians are brought up. What bothers me, however, is the methods by which it is done. The children should be taken from the parents and sent to the countryside to learn and understand life of the workers? It seems to me that Plato is setting himself up to argue the justification of eugenics (if he hasn't already done so in this argument). Am I way off base, here?
ReplyDeleteAs Joe stated, I wish I had put this in my response. Going on Joe's comment of how it bothers him, I disagree with that and support Plato's idea of taking those who he wants to be the Guardians away from there parents. It to me is sound logic due to the fact of my ideas of being my parents but further educated, to which I take merely the same paths because their ideology is what raised me. Furthermore, taking the early guardian away does exactly what Plato wants in aspect of them further understanding the different planes of life one takes to become more or less a man or women of the people. Putting this idea to music I completely agree with Kelsey.
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