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Plato's impact on human nature
Plato's impact on human nature
Plato's influence
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Recommended: Plato's impact on human nature
Topic: Plato’s Theory of Ideas
Student: Milena Sadžak
Date: december, 2001
Author’s introductionary remark:
Still innocent and so naïve, the common human consciousness slowly began to raise itself, giving birth thereat to great men, who will forever remain in the hearts of the “consecrated”. One of those great men was Plato.
Plato as a philosopher. Plato as an artist. Plato as the birth of concsiousness of its own limitedness. Plato as my own flight from reality.
Being young and inexperienced, and having read one small but important part of Plato’s great treasury of dialogues, I stood lost and confused. It is impossible for a philosopher to believe in the existence of two simultaneous worlds. But that is what his words are saying to me. Did he truly believe that our souls had existed in that perfect world, prior to their birth? Being certain that Plato did not think so, and having realized the boundaries of my understanding, I’ve consulted people who dedicated their lives to this great philosopher. I must admit that it was just then that my confusion reached its utmost point. I have never seen so many confronted opinions on the same topic. Well, we have the dialogues right in front of us, what is the thing that’s keeping us from realizing Plato’s thought as it is, and at least reduce the number of confrontations? I know what my obstacle is: youth, lack of experience, lack of knowledge, but what is theirs?
CONCLUSION: The young common human consciousness created a genius, but a young one, such as itself. Youth as such carries with it the impossibility of valid thought-word transmission. The space is too big. In time, the young common consciousness perfects itself. Its improvement implies the improvement of individual consciousness. The possibility to validly transmit thought-word is greater, therefore the interspace is reduced, and the number of dissacords in interpretations of philosophical works is reduced as well. Plato still belongs to the young common consciousness, therefore, we have inummerable explanations of one and the same thing.
Theory of Ideas
Nowadays, Plato is rightfully considered the originator of idealism. To explain in details what the concept of idealism means represents a great difficulty and demands great effort, so I will merely define idealism as a philosophy which reduces all existence to forms of thought, or in Plato’s case, idea.
The word “idea” originates from the Greek word “eidos” which literally means “appearance, image”.
In Plato’s thought, “idea” represents the first principle, cause, form, shape, essence.
In my mind, the name Plato carried an indubitable authority. Despite that, I found myself contradicting his ideas. I completely rejected the idea of an absolute beauty only visible to an elite class of philosophers. When I voiced my opinions, some people nodded along while others pushed back. The instant I moved from disagreeing internally to verbally, I found a type of joy in the back and forth– a joy that came not from my being right, but from learning to defend my ideas and considering those of
Plato’s perception of the human world was described by Rubenstein as “discomfort and longing.” According to Rubenstein, the Platonic epoch is filled with humans that are not one with themselves; potentials of the intellectual integrity are disrupted by this distrust humans have against themselves that are driven by humanly desires and instincts. Unlike Aristotelian epoch where it would be seen that peace would be amongst human and nature, Plato’s universe seems like it is far from what it should be. Rubenstein described it as there is an idea
In his Allegory Plato shows us how a man ascends from the darkness of a cave to the light of the outside world. In this ascent Plato’s man passes through four distinct stages of cognition: from imagination, to belief, understanding, and finally knowledge.
* Plato. "Plato's Crito." YouTube Video. YouTube. TeacherOfPhilosophy, 8 June 2011. Web. 1 Apr. 2013. .
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In The Republic, Plato presents the relationship of the Divided Line and the Allegory of the Cave in connection to his epistemology and metaphysics. Throughout the Republic he discusses his beliefs on many topics using examples that express his ideas more thoroughly. He is able to convey very complex beliefs through his examples of the Divided Line and Allegory of the Cave. Plato’s epistemology depicts his idea of the Divided Line which is a hierarchy where we discover how one obtains knowledge and the Allegory of the Cave relates to Plato’s metaphysics by representing how one is ignorant/blinded at the lowest level but as they move up in the Divided Line, they are able to reach enlightenment through the knowledge of the truth.
Russo S Michael. Plato in a nut shell. Sophia Project, Philosophy archive. 2001. Web. 23 May, 2014.
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He wrote many dialogues, and one of them includes his famous dialogue called “Allegory of the Cave.” This dialogue explained how we were born into being very naïve people about our surroundings and taking things for granted, but eventually with the right education we grow to be philosophers that know the Form of Good. Society closes our eyes and whispers things to us in our ears and we believe it, in order to break free we need to educate ourselves into being more knowledgeable about our surroundings. We need to analyze even the smallest things, nothing is to be taken for granted because everything is more complex than what it seems (Plato, p. 26). Plato also states in his idea of self, the soul, that the soul is composed of three parts, our desires, the conscious awareness of reason and the spirited part which gets angry at injustice (Plato, p.40). His allegory and this idea about the parts of the soul connect with each other and might as well lead us to understanding what his idea truly means. Like the first argument, we could say that because our souls is what makes us alive, we are aware of the life we live, therefore we become philosophers only when we do not forget where we came from. This though, sounds contradicting to itself if we take the second argument in hand. If our soul is our life and our body is what carries it, than our ability to become philosophers depends solely on our ability to remove our soul from the body in