Of course Platon is aware of the realities of the material life. When he starts to design a city he begins with those providing food, shelter and clothing, and then adds everything that society needs. But he wishes for man and city, while developing following their own rules, to come closer together in the same time, to have the tendency of even pursuing their lives according to harmony, beauty and the supreme goodness. This is an extremely difficult task, but he nevertheless imagines the model of a city fulfilling such requirements.
In fact Platon stresses too much the "harmony" in depths, the "cold order of things" as we would say, thus neglecting to a certain extend the real nature of man, open and intro-open, neglecting the role that man's psychological level has in setting the quality of his individual life. Man and society cannot be modeled only according to some principles that are derived from the existence of the depths; the equilibrium between openness and intro-openness requires that we are of an integral and not unilateral wisdom. And such an equilibrium can only be dynamic, never stable and perfect.
Platon also says that during his lifetime man should rise towards the knowledge of existence. At the foundation of spiritual life, or rather as the first stage of the spiritual life he puts Science: arithmetics, plane and spatial geometry, astronomy. These sciences, though they deal with "appearances" and not with "essences", are bringing us closer, are preparing us for the higher levels of spiritual life, of wisdom and of search for the "essence", that we will attempt after passing through the turmoil of the public life. Art is not as much appreciated since it departs even more than the appearance (that is dealt with by the Science) from the essence.

The Goodness, as a component of the spiritual life, has multiple facets in Platon's view: it means exercising a lucrative profession, to which it adds the happiness and harmless pleasures of life; it means health and beauty of the body; it is wisdom, temperance, righteousness and courage of soul; it means possessing those that are necessary for living; but it also means knowledge, rising of man to the level of existence.

From our image the awareness and the spiritual are born in the ring of the existence. This does not mean that the spiritual has no physical support. We think that the physical support of the spiritual is the beingness, that connection with a different kind of material substance, having properties that confer it sensitivities that we will have to search by science, using methods that we do not know yet.
If we think of the way our ideas exist within ourselves, in our brain, if we think of their concrete physical trace in the space-time matter, we could believe that we are restricted to developing ideas that are acceptable to the structures of this matter. Sometimes one goes to a structuralism pushed to extremes, of saying that it is the structure of our brain that determines our ideas, even if it is the contact with the outside that triggers them, or the search for them.
In reality there is a relative psychological independence from brain structures: ideas are generated by ideas, using a material support that has to admit them in a way, but this admittance is only a general compatibility and not a structural determination. No doubt that there are shades, and manifestations will exist that are more or less determined by the space-time structures of the brain. The psychological form in which ideas move would not raise problems were not for the awareness of these ideas, their psychic implication via awareness.

Via awareness and beingness, via the mental field, we free ourselves from any pre-existent structure, we have a complete freedom for invention, but also for error, for absurd. The behavior of our psychic is rather complicated, it being between brain's instructions and the permanently open possibilities of the informatter.
The spiritual results from the tension produced by this extension of our psychic,partly structured and partly unstructured. The psychic is the world of our ideas, sentiments, will. The spiritual is the consciousness of placing the psychic between the space-time existence and orthoexistence. The spiritual is that part of our psychic that can be marked by a maximum awareness. The spiritual remains bound to the psychological life of the individual and to the social life.

Intro-Open Systems 83