Republic, Plato (Translated by Christopher Rowe)

• “Those who [have made money for themselves] are twice as attached to [money] as everybody else: just as poets love their poems, and fathers love their children, so money-makers love their money—as their own handiwork, and then on top of that, like everyone else, they love it for its usefulness. This makes them hard to be with, because they’re unwilling to put in a good word for anything but wealth.”
• “The ways to be bad are plenty, the choice easy - The path is smooth, the destination close; But to goodness, the gods ordain, we must sweat our way” - Hesiod (Works and Days)
• Speaks of preventing the corruption of the people by baseness, “like animals in a bad pasture, taking a little from here, a little from there as they graze, day after day, not noticing that they are putting together one big thing, and a bad one, in their own souls?”
• “When lack of restraint and illnesses burgeon in a city, don’t lawcourts and doctors open up all over the place, and the arts of lawcourt speaking and medicine start giving themselves airs, as many people, even free ones, start to take such things really seriously? […] And where doctors are concerned it’s reasonable enough to need their skills for healing wounds, or because happens to have caught some seasonal disease; what is shameful—don’t you think so?—is filling oneself with fluids and gases, as if one were some sort of lake, through the kind of lazy regimen we’ve just described…”
• Speaks of mollycoddling diseases, this tendency to enable overindulgence by overprotection and enablement of indulgence.
• “The cunning and suspicious kind, who’s done many unjust things in his time, and thinks he’s wise in a smart sort of way—he looks clever when he’s with people like himself, because he knows from consulting the models in himself that he needs to be extracautious, but when he’s in the company of good people and people older than himself, he immediately looks stupid, suspecting people when he doesn’t need to and not recognizing a healthy disposition when he sees it, because he has no model of such a thing available to him.”
• The Good will purse the right physical training, the “one that spares him any need of a doctor, except when he can’t avoid it.”
• To exercise to arouse the spirited aspect of our nature, not to “undertake diets and workouts for the sake of [our] physique.”
• Socrates mentions that a life with physical exercise but without music produces fierceness and harshness, and a life with music but without exercise produces softness and gentleness.
• “What we’re aiming for in founding our city isn’t to make any particular group of our people exceptionally happy, but rather to achieve happiness so far as possible for the city as a whole.”
• “Let me indulge myself in the way lazy thinkers do when they’re out walking on their own.”
• “The half is more than the whole.” - Hesiod
• “Philosophers are those capable of getting a hold on that which remains forever exactly as it is, and those who have no such capacity, lost and wandering as they are in a multiplicity of things that are now this and now that, are non-philosophers.”
  • Rajasa vs. Sattva. Multiplicity vs whole.
• Socrates’ requirement for a good philosopher are good memory, quickness at learning, open/high-mindedness, grace and a love for and affinity to truth, justice, courage, and moderation.
• “It’s the form of goodness that is the most important subject, since it is what brings about the goodness and usefulness both of just things and if everything else.
• “Finding the eyes of the soul dug deep down in some kind of alien slime, [dialectical inquiry] gently draws it out and guides it upwards, employing the kinds of expertise [math, geometry, astronomy, harmonics, dialectic] we’ve talked about as co-workers to help bring it round.”
• The maths and sciences are frequently labelled as branches of knowledge, but they are actually not knowledge itself but a way of approaching it through their grouping together. They produce thoughtfulness—more discriminating than belief, but not quite knowledge.
• The line of knowledge has first knowledge itself, second thoughtfulness, third conviction, and fourth conjecture. The third and fourth are beliefs (conviction being strong opinion, conjecture being a belief based on incomplete information [isn’t incompleteness what makes it a belief—doesn’t that make conviction part conjecture as well?])
• “A body that’s forced to work hard is never the worse for it, but a lesson forced on the soul is never retained. […] As you bring up these children of yours in their various subjects, best not to do it using force, but in the form of play.”
• A man without spirit or reason falls into love of money, choosing passion to be the blind leader of his chorus.
• The oligarchic man, who loves money above all else creates an internal division. In front of others he will remain respectable to maintain reputation, but behind closed doors will be a slave to his desires. This lack of unity will lead to an internal faction, falling “a long way short of the true goodness of whole, when it is at one and in harmony with itself.”
• “Ruling as they do on the basis of their great wealth, I imagine the rulers are unwilling to place legal curbs on young people who lose their self-restraint, and prevent them from spending and losing their property. They want to be able to buy and lend their money on it themselves, in order to add still further to their own wealth and prestige.”
  • When money is paramount to political leaders, they will not regulate their citizens (moderate their citizens), for regulating their citizens to deny the pursuit of indulgence would cause them to lose money (which they hold paramount)
• When rulers become oligarchic, they’ll be pale and have “rolls of excess flesh, […] hopelessly wheezing and helpless.” This leads to democracy—a rebellion started by the ruled as they realize how weak and pathetic oligarchic rulers are and overthrow them.
  • Same goes for a parent who is stingy and loves money. Pursuing money at the expense of health, their children will lose their respect and use their wealth to pursue selfish pursuits.
• Three fundamental types of people: lovers of wisdom, lovers of winning, and lovers of profit.
• “’So it looks as if people who have no experience of wisdom and excellence, and who are engaged the whole time with feasting and the like, travel down and then as far back again as the middle, wandering like that their whole lives through, and never rising further - never yet having looked up, to the true up, beyond the middle, let alone travelled there, or been really and truly filled with things of substance, or tasted a pleasure that is sure and pure. Instead they look permanently down, as if they were cattle, heads down to the ground - or rather the table - grazing away, alternately fattening themselves and copulating, kicking and butting each other with iron hooves and horns to get more of the same, and finally doing one another to death, from frustration, because they’re filling themselves with nothing substantial, they’re not filling the substantial part of themselves, and they’re not even filling the part of themselves that contains it.’”
• Socrates talks about the tri-nature of the human soul. The first component belongs to passion and desire and money-loving, something like a multi-headed beast, with some heads good, some bad; the second belongs to the spirit, courage and glory and power-loving, something like a lion; the third is the rational element, love of wisdom, and is something like a human. When the multi-headed beast rules over the lion and human, chaos and misery ensues. When the power-lust lion rules, it is slightly better than if the passions ruled however still falling short of the rational. When the rational element rules and regulates, taming the beast to satiate only necessary desires (like the need for food and reproductive sex) and taming the lion (being moderately courageous), one can pursue truth and becomes most happy, clear-headed, and fulfilled.
  • The multiheaded beast reminds me of Indrajit, a demon in Ramayana and a master of illusion, changing forms constantly. Indrajit is a manifestation of these whimsical passions and desires, which lead to confusion, deception, and so on.
• “And isn’t the measure of the excellence, beauty, and correctness of any manufactured item, any living creature, any activity none other than the use for which each is made or born?”
  • Do we as humans surrender our excellence to the technologies we develop? People are using their bodies less and less—spending all day passively sitting and consuming—become more disembodied from the beauty and excellence of life itself.