Plato's Concept of Freedom Explored

Plato's concept of freedom involves the attainment of a perfected form of society. His theoretical republic embodies this freedom in a way that most Americans would not see as a free society at all, but rather a strictly controlled community. Philosopher-kings were Plato's conception of what a perfect ruler or rulers would be like. Freedom to Plato was not the idea of a person being able to go out and do anything they pleased, but of a person being exactingly shaped to embody ideals that are as close to the forms of beauty, justice, and good as a person or society could possibly could be.

Plato's republic is an ideal society that he uses to unfold the secrets of the world upon the believer . He introduces the concept of the "forms" to us here by explaining that everything is a copy of a perfected form. Forms are the perfected versions of everything from geometrical shapes to ideals like freedom and goodness. For instance, beauty is real, but on earth, everything we would consider to embody beauty is merely a copy, from sunsets to flowers to grass. Another good example of one of Plato's forms is the circle. It is obviously not possible to create a perfect circle but you can create a copy of one here on Earth. Plato also writes about how he believes that art is even further from the forms than nature is. The forms exist outside of nature, and nature is concerned with copying them.

Art, to Plato, is a copy of a copy. Artists try to capture nature's beauty, which is actually just nature trying to reproduce the forms here on earth. In believing that art is essentially farther from the forms than nature, Plato argues that art pushes people away from their true selves and away from the forms. He argues as well that the arts negatively shape and influence citizens from birth and hinder the formation of a perfected republic.