The Form of the Good in Book VI, is the ultimate object of knowledge. The Form of the Good is the source of all other Forms. It is the source of the entire intelligible realm, of intelligibility itself, and to describe the Form of the Good explicitly, he attempts to give us a sense of it by comparing it to the sun, as in the Allegory of the Cave. It is only when a man grabs the Form of the Good that he achieves the highest level of cognition and understanding. When a man takes this last step, he is ready to become a philosopher king.
The author describes the four unjust constitutions of the city and man. There is timocracy, and the honor-driven man who rules that sort of government; there is oligarchy, which is ruled by a man driven by his
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He has three reasons for doing so: they pretend to know all sorts of things, but they really know nothing at all. They cannot know everything about everything that they write, and they create images that are far removed from what is real. By presenting things so far from the truth, these poets pervert souls. Next, they do not portray the good parts of the soul. The rational part of the soul is the quiet, stable and not easy to imitate or understand. Poets aim to imitate the worst parts of the soul, the parts that are easily excitable and over the top. Poems appeal to the worst parts of the soul and nourish it while diverting energy away from the rational part. Finally, poetry corrupts the best souls. It deceives people into sympathizing with those who grieve excessively, who lust inappropriately, and who laugh at unintelligent humor. Poets appeal to the base part of the soul by imitating unjust inclinations. By encouraging us to indulge ignoble emotion in sympathy with the characters we hear about, poetry encourages us to indulge these emotions in life. Soon, people have become the unrefined sort of people we see on stage or hear about in epic