Why Plato does not get human nature

As a student, I am learning their is more to politics than government. Plato’s Republic does outline a government structure, and shows how it may affect government institutions. But can a government do more than this? Can it not only influence the way its subjects think, but how they think? Can it even enforce optimum conditions for human happiness? I don’t believe a government should influence human happiness. In fact, I don’t even believe it can influence human happiness. I have some questions about Plato’s premises, and while I can’t provide answers, I feel that they would not stand to modern scrutiny.

First, I question if human souls all work the same, as Plato assumes. Plato does build an elaborate schema for a three part soul and a “divided line,” of experience, with reason being the highest form. These examples only show that Plato guessed we had the same machinery. What struck me further, though, was the education of the guardians. More specifically, Plato suggests that poetry harms all pupils, and suggests striking lines from Homer’s epics in the beginning of Book 3.

Second, I feel Plato’s views of eternal forms take out subjective experiences, including his own. Eternal forms, or objective reality, do exist, but each individual has a different way of relating to them. Language is probably the easiest example of subjective relation, as it allows its speakers to categorize objects. Plato used language freely in his example of a bed in Book 10, describing the bed as a bed. Perhaps there weren’t many words for furniture in ancient Greek, but I guess that the bed Plato described may have also been called a couch or a futon, each with a slightly different implication of its function. Of course, given how different each human thinks, there are ways other than language that each individual relates to the bed, each slightly different.

If human souls did work the same, and if they did experience reality the same way, then a totalitarian society may have an optimum level of human happiness. But humans don’t work that way. I can’t project the “correct” psychology of humans, but this book did teach me it’s important to political theory. How humans perceive reality, and how they relate to that reality greatly affects how a government forms.