They should focus their entire lives on serving the state. The vast number of people though would be laborers, made up of farmers, artisans and merchants. The Laborers are the ones who provide for society. They have natural appetites, so laborers must aspire to temperance. .
Jacob: What would the role of women be in this state? .
Plato: Women would be equal. Women can govern just as effectively as a man, because they have they have the same powers of reasoning, and rulers govern through their ability to reason. Women though in order to rule must have the same education as men and be exempt from child bearing and housekeeping, like men. After all a state that does not educate and train is like a man who only trains his right arm. .
Jacob: Well since you are the greatest philosopher in the history as Western civilization what do you think about the nature of reality? .
Plato: You see reality is divided into those two parts, the region of reality and the region of ideas. The region of the senses you see is everything around us it's what you can see, hear, feel, smell, and taste, the material world. We can never truly know, or have knowledge, about anything in the material world, because everything in it flows. What I mean is that everything in the material world is everything changes, nothing is constant; time dissolves any substance. And you can never have true knowledge about a world that is in a constant state of change, only opinions. The realm of ideas is where we gain our true knowledge. This realm of ideas can't be seen or heard but its idea's are eternal and immutable. These ideas are the patterns on which everything in the material world is built on. For example in the material world for example there is a butterfly. That butterfly dies in the material world, but in the world of ideas the idea of butterfly's remains; it is eternal, and because the idea of the butterfly is eternal we can have true knowledge about it.
