Human Life Is a Constant Choice

Choices are made every day in our lives, even not making a choice is still choosing. People are more times than not driven off of their own free will, they decide their actions and the courses they will take. Whether a person’s choice is driven off of how they justly see it is up to them, though. In the end, there is justice for all of our choices.

In the Myth of Er from Book X of the Republic by Plato, a soldier Er is killed in battle. His body (which was still well intact) was taken to be buried and on the 12th day he returned to life stating that he’d “seen the other world”. This “other world” that Er mentioned is essentially an in-between to the afterlife where souls go after death. Here they would be filtered through and judged on their good and bad deeds, where if the good outweighed the bad, they’d go up to heaven, and if the bad outweighed the good, they’d go down into hell. Er was told that he was just a messenger and that he would gather what was going on there and return to spread the word of this place, which is how he came back to life.

The concept of free will is one choosing certain courses of action in their lives as they see fit, thus being responsible for those actions. On the contrary to free will, determinism is the concept that all actions are established by other previous factors, meaning there is already a set course for how things will play out.

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The idea of free will and determinism play a part in the Myth of Er, because whether the souls that conducted good and bad deeds truly chose their paths from their actions in life or if their actions were destined to be that way, they still would have to “pay the piper” essentially. In my viewpoint, people are driven off of free will because a lot of the times we act off of our current feelings and don’t necessarily rationalize. This could possibly be overruled by determinism, however, because essentially our feelings are previously occurring before the actions that we choose to make.

I still think that free will is more so our nature than determinism, however, because we are very free and fickle-hearted beings and depending on our mood and feelings at the time, we can choose one thing over another which might not have always been the case depending on our current state of mind (e.g. if I am feeling happy I would want to go to a party, but then something could make me upset and I decide that I am not in the mood to go to the party after all).

In the Republic, Plato defines justice in a multitude of ways. He believes that justice is the overall attribute of an individual and that every ethical decision would be due to the belief of being ‘just’. He states in Book IV that “justice is doing one’s own job” and it is “harmony”. Essentially, all moral and ethical decisions are of justice of the person and who they are. Looking at Plato’s Crito, Socrates has ideas of what being just is as well. At this point, Socrates is discussing the matter of whether he should escape jail and if it would be moral and just. He further defines injustice by knowingly doing wrongs, therefore being just is doing what’s right and ethical.

It was at this conclusion that Socrates presumed it an injustice to break a law by escaping jail because it is unjust and dishonest. He takes this seriously because he has concluded that there is a part of us (i.e. our soul) that is affected negatively by unjust acts and positively by just acts. In the Myth of Er, justice is basically being served to the individual souls as they are being judged on whether they’re going to heaven or hell based on their actions and deeds throughout life – if they were more moral and just, they’d go to the heavens, and if they conducted more injustices, they’d go to the hells.

To me, being just is being moral, fair, and honest. I can understand and relate to Socrates’ way of thinking, though I can’t say that I always follow it. To be just all the time is to be a perfect person essentially and we are just not set up that way. We waver and have faults and injustices, both knowingly and unknowingly. Being a just person all of the time is the optimal idea of following an authentic life – one everyone should work towards. Our choices along the way determine how just of a person we truly are.

The Allegory of the Cave from Book VII in the Republic is deemed to exemplify how the human soul is influenced by education and how we’ve accepted to believe the things we’ve learned. Plato presents four ways and stages in which we think – imagination, belief, thought, and understanding. In this book, Socrates narrates the metaphorical story. He presents prisoners that were born in and bound to a cave, therefore it is all they know. They perceive shadows being cast from statues behind a fire to be the realest thing to them because it is the most they’ve ever perceived. This point of perception is their imaginative competence.

One prisoner breaks free of their captivity and comes to find that there is more to be discovered. He finds the statues that were casting the shadows and distinguishes it as the most real thing he knows – a physical object – and this is belief. He continues his journey of enlightenment and learns that there is more realness to consume. Outside of the cave he is flourished by even more reality than before and finds that the statues are only replicas of the realest thing yet, the outside world around him – this is thought. As the prisoner notices the sun, it has become his true version of the fire in the cave he once knew. He comprehends that the sun is the result of all that is around him (i.e. light, ability to see surroundings, and life) and represents ‘the Form of the Good’ and the basis of knowledge – he has come to understanding.

The overall concept of the prisoner in the Allegory of the Cave is that now, this man must use this education that his soul has reached to inform the others in the cave that there is more to be learned in life, you just have to be willing and open to the unfamiliarity of the unknown. Though the prisoners can be broken from their bonds of the other freed prisoner, it is up to them to choose if they want to remain in the cave and stick to what they know or allow themselves to be vulnerable to new understandings. This transitions the prisoners from determinism (them being shut off from all realities and essentially forced to believe only one true thing, the shadows) to free will (them deciding for themselves if they want to remove themselves from the familiarity of the cave and perceive new knowledge and beliefs).

The Allegory also shows that Plato is both an idealist and a rationalist. As a rationalist, he uses reason as a way to gather knowledge by factual things; as an idealist, he uses thoughts and ideas to believe things are as real as they seem. This circles back to the Myth of Er, where he has to perceive the in-between place that he is in as a new form of reality. Essentially, no one knows the details and intricacies of this place and uses their idealistic thoughts to perceive it as real (this can be known as “believing without seeing”).

Rationally, Er is there and he uses the Forms around him to understand this place. Er being brought to the in-between can represent the prisoner being freed out into the world – a new place of realness for him – versus a previous reality (i.e. the cave for the prisoner and the world for Er). This understanding of education can also reflect back to how people perceive what being just and unjust is. Without enlightenment of knowledge to the soul, how can one truly know what is real and right if they are not brought to this comprehension to grasp it all and determine it for themselves.

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