Plato's Offspring Of The Good Essay

Plato’s Republic defines goodness through the analogy of knowledge and sight. I noticed that when Glaucon and Adeimantus confront Socrates about his belief on the definition of goodness, Socrates does not directly define the term but instead decides to explain what “the offspring of the good” is (Plato 168). To describe this, he uses an analogy of the sun to compare the light of the sun to the knowledge and truth of goodness. He highlights, “The good begot the sun as a proportion to itself” (170). What Socrates means by this analogy is that as the sun uses light to see and be seen by the eye, goodness uses truth and knowledge to know and be known by the soul. The “offspring of the good” to Socrates, then, is the sun. Without the sun, one would

He argues that every person pursues what they believe seems good but not what actually is. Knowing the Form of the Good is the highest form of intelligence, and “knowing everything else is useless without knowing the good” (Plato 166). One is unable to know the other Forms without knowledge of what goodness is and means because the Form of the Good encompasses all of them. Just as the good begot the sun, it produces the other Forms. Thus, the Form of the Good is responsible for both truth and the purpose of existence and being alike. Only when one obtains this knowledge will they be fit to become a guardian in Socrates’ ideal city and realize that the Form of the Good is “the cause of everything upright and beautiful in all” (178). In particular, philosophers would rule the best in his city because they have reached this realization by seeking to know the good, unlike the uneducated, who “have no single target in life at which to aim all their activity in public and private” (179-180). Through Socrates’ analogy of the Divided Line, they can understand the Form of the Good by ascending through the visible realm to the intelligible realm and reaching its highest segment,