THE REPUBLIC, PLATO
translated by R.E.Allen, Yale Press 2006
BOOK IX THIRD
CONTEST: REAL and UNREAL PLEASURES
(586a)
So those
who have no experience of wisdom and virtue, who spend
their time in constant banqueting
and such, are carried downward,
it seems, and back up again only
so far as what is intermediate;
and in
this way they wander throughout life. They never step
outside,
never
look up, nor are carried
to what is truly above.
They are ~
never really filled
with what is real, never taste a pleasure abiding
and
pure, but like cattle ever gazing downward, with heads bowed
to earth, they graze at table and eat their fill and copulate, and
because
of overreaching to have more of
these things, they
butt
and kick each other with horns and hooves of iron, killing through
insatiable greed because they cannot
fill what is neither real nor
continent in themselves with what is not real.
586b Socrates,
your description of the life of most men is that of an oracle said
Glaucon.
BOOK xx THE MYTH OF
ER (6l3e-62ld)
618e ... so that, from reflecting on all this, he can look to the nature
of the soul and choose the worse and better life. He will call
worse that life which leads it to become
more unjust, better whatever
leads it to become more just, and dismiss all else. For we
have
seen that this is the sovereign choice in living and dying.
continue!
- Mail arrived in May 2012, In Polunsky are some Mailroom problems!
Pe
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