On The Pun Sense Of Justice And Its Meaning In Republic

The Republic is a classical great philosophical work, which raisesmuch issues, and it’s difficult to understand it thoroughly. In this dialogue,Socrates,the main character implied much in the conversation,whichunderlies ambiguities for its readers. The Irish poet, Yeats asserted thatRepublic embraces Plato’s ambition and thought, in other words,contemplation is prior to everything, and justice is the first standard of anyaction. Republic showes Paltonic thought in the field of politics, ethics,education and arts, so any issue is in the net of the whole problem.However, in the maze of the western philosophical theory, only the Platonicphilosophy is the coil in the hand of Ariadne. The death of Socrates andPeloponnesian shocked him much, so he tried to find a way out for Athens,the issue of justice is an answer to many questions of the public life inAthens.In the first book, socrates rejects some popular opinions on justice,then he take an analogy betwwen the city and soul for a definition of juestice, in one sense, the issue of what kind of life is happy one istransferred to the issue that what is justice of a state. If the justice of thecity is equal to the soul’s, the definition of the former ones will be theanswer to the later ones. The problem is that why Plato still looks into whatis the justice of the soul? It seemed that if there is no private interests, therewill be a impartial ruler, so if there is no selfish part in one’s soul, it will bea soul with justice. It’s a certainty that this analogy implies an apology thatif any person of mass could be an Ruler, he would be a just citizen.Maybe, justice lies nowhere but in soul, and only the Goodness canshow the accessible way to justice. As Alice Murdoch refers that Goodnessis ralative to perception, and when we recognize the form of goodness, weshould take care of other’s situation and help them overcome their dilemma.During the elucidation of parable of cave and sun, the ideal of Goodnesscomes to being clear. Socrates tries to find the door to the public life via the parable of cave, and the enlighted men willconstruct a state of justice. The problem is that it’s impossile to realizeenlightment in an distorted political system. Gadamer mentioned in hisGadamer on Plato that the ideal of Platonic Goodness surpasses all theconventional beliefs, for its background is the state in speech. So we canfind justice nowhere but in the state of speech.