The spectrum of Plato’s thought is wide and deep. The structure of the discourse on Politeia designed by him is also very dazzling. That light penetrates discourses such as happiness, justice, polis, education, recognition, identity, art and so on. Very dazzling. However, it is as attractive as it is flashy. It is not accidental that Whitehead claims that the history of Western philosophy over the past 2,400 years is nothing more than a footnote to Plato. Such praise came because the architectural aesthetics of Plato’s Politeia were so attractive. Although attractive, the architectural aesthetics of his Politeia are complex enough to be difficult to approach.
Therefore, the evaluation of Plato’s Politeia is complicatedly divided into pros and cons. On the one hand, it is criticized as totalitarianism, fascism, a closed society, and anti-democracy, while on the other hand, it is evaluated positively as the best pedagogy ever written by mankind and a ‘paradigm’ of an ideal society. I think the cause for these conflicting evaluations is that they focus too much on the political discourse.
But I chose a different focus. Politeia appears to be about ‘politics’ or ‘state’ from a nominalistic perspective, but from a realist perspective, it can be confirmed that the alpha and omega of Politeia about ‘happiness’.
The goal of this article is to confirm that the core of Plato’s Politeia lies in the ‘theory of happiness’. By doing this, we hope to achieve the effect of finding a possibility of reconciliation between the pros and cons surrounding Politeia.